ABSTRACT
Cislak and Cichoka integrate the literature on social power and the Big Two by reviewing empirical work on how power affects the agentic versus communal content of social perception, evaluation, and behavior. It is argued and shown that people with high power have a stronger self-focus than people with low power. Consequently, power promotes an agentic mind-set. Power leads to stronger attention to agency and propensity to express agency. These effects are manifested in social information processing, social judgments, values, and behavior. Power seems to reverse the usually observed primacy effect of communion in person perception. The authors discuss implications of this reasoning for the stability and change of social hierarchies.
