With Great Power Comes Great Social Distance: Exploring the Social Cognition of the Powerful

Powerful people, more than powerless people, desire social distance from others. This research investigated whether this consequence of power was observable in an early-stage cognitive process—information encoding. Participants (N = 100) were assigned to high or low power roles in a fictional organisation. Encoding information in reference to the self or others was manipulated and measured, with depth of other-referential encoding conceptualised as a signal of social distance. High power participants were hypothesised to show a detriment in this form of encoding, relative to low power participants. Results partially supported this hypothesis. Exploratory analysis revealed high power participants recalled less other-referentially encoded information than low power participants, though this finding was only marginally significant. Further, the study explored whether this effect was moderated by social relevance of the other, as powerful people to attend more to information regarding relevant, compared to non-relevant, others. It was hypothesised that social distance (indexed by self-report and encoding measures) would not differ between levels of power when the other was relevant at a personal or group level— operationalised as desire for other affiliation and group identification, respectively. These hypotheses were partially supported. Moderated regression analyses indicated that otherreferential recall was equal between high and low power participants at high levels of other affiliation and group identification. This study partially supports the notion that powerful people’s preference for social distance is observable in their cognition, specifically in their lack of interest in attending to information about others. Theoretical implications and future directions are discussed