The Effects of Power and Social Norms on Power Decision Making

摘要

Power, as an important and long-term research topic of politics field,has attracted extensive attention. In recent years, power has become a hotresearch field of social psychology. Power as a kind of psychologicalvariables, affects the individual’s cognition, emotion and behavior. At present, theopinion that power affects individual decisions, attracts more and more attention of researchers. Among many factors that affectthe individual’s decision behavior, social environment and group’s role cannotbe ignored. The research takes the gameexperiment to study decision, form the sense of social norms and power, recruiting124 students in University, starting high level and low level of powerrespectively, then displaying descriptive social norms. Next, game experimentbegins, observing differences between subjects facing different forms of powerin the course of the game to make choices and decisions. Theresults show that the sense of power level and social norms influence powerdecision-making behavior. The sense of power has a significant influence on theacquisition of the blue symbol (legitimacy) and theacquisition and use of the red symbol (force) (p < 0.05); social norms have asignificant influence on the acquisition of the red symbol (force) and theacquisition and use of the blue symbol (legitimacy) (p < 0.05); power and socialnorms influence the remaining sum of the blue symbol (legitimacy) withinteraction (p < 0.05). The result shows that the higher power people use more force tosatisfy their own needs, and the lower authority uses more legitimacy to satisfytheir own needs.