Power vs Status: Social Power, Prestige, Dominance, and Hierarchy
Updated: 3 days ago
Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: September 24, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Power and status often travel together, but they are not the same thing. In contemporary social psychology, power usually refers to asymmetric control over valued resources, decisions, or outcomes on which other people depend. Status refers to respect, admiration, esteem, and voluntary deference granted by other people. A person can therefore have power without status, status without power, both, or neither. This distinction is central to modern research on social hierarchy and is supported by major reviews of the field, including Magee and Galinsky’s review of power and status and a 2025 Psychological Bulletin systematic review of hierarchy concepts and measures.
The distinction matters because the two forms of rank work through different social mechanisms. Power changes what a person can make happen. Status changes how much other people value that person and how readily they defer. Both can produce influence, but influence obtained through control over consequences is psychologically different from influence obtained through respect. Recent scholarship has also emphasized a measurement problem: researchers have sometimes used power, status, dominance, and prestige interchangeably or used scales whose content does not match the label attached to them. The 2025 systematic review by Körner, Overbeck, and Schütz calls attention to these jingle-jangle problems and argues for sharper construct definitions.
Power vs Status: The Core Difference
The shortest useful distinction is this: power is control over consequential outcomes; status is socially conferred respect. Hasty and Maner’s review describes power in terms of control over resources and the capacity to influence through rewards and punishments, while status reflects influence grounded in respect and admiration. Anderson, Hildreth, and Howland likewise define status as respect, admiration, and voluntary deference and distinguish it from power, financial success, and belonging.
Power asks, “Whose choices can alter my options or outcomes?” Status asks, “Whose judgment, expertise, standing, or example do people respect and voluntarily defer to?” A manager who controls hiring, schedules, budgets, or access to opportunities may possess power. A highly respected expert with no formal control over those resources may possess status. In one person the two can coincide; in another they can diverge sharply.
For the broader scientific construct of power—its relational definition, French–Raven bases, Keltner’s approach–inhibition theory, and modern research—see Social Power: Definition, Types, French and Raven, Keltner, and Modern Psychology.
Power is based on dependence and control
Power is relational. It exists because one actor has relatively greater control over something another actor values. The relevant resource may be money, access, information, approval, punishment, scheduling, opportunities, membership, or the ability to alter a decision. In the influential hierarchy framework developed by Magee and Galinsky, power is tied to control over valued resources. This means power can exist even when the powerful person is disliked, disrespected, or seen as illegitimate.
Power is also context-dependent. A person can be powerful in one relationship and comparatively powerless in another. The executive who controls a department budget may have little control over the judgments of a professional community. The parent who controls a child’s transportation has power in that dependency relation but may have no comparable power in the child’s peer group. Treating power as a permanent personal possession misses its relational structure.
Power over others should also be kept separate from personal control. Personal control concerns the ability to regulate one’s own circumstances and choices. Social power concerns asymmetric capacity to affect other people’s outcomes. The two may correlate, but they answer different questions and should not be treated as interchangeable psychological constructs.
Status is based on social valuation
Status is located in the evaluations of other people. Anderson and colleagues’ Psychological Bulletin review defines it through respect, admiration, and voluntary deference. A high-status person is treated as socially valuable within a relevant group or domain. That value may come from competence, knowledge, achievement, generosity, experience, reputation, or other characteristics that the group considers important.
Because status is conferred, it depends on an audience. Someone can be highly esteemed in one community and nearly unknown in another. A leading scientist may have high status in a research field but little status in an unrelated social setting. A veteran employee may have high informal status among coworkers even when a newly appointed supervisor has greater formal power.
Status in this social-psychological sense is also different from socioeconomic status. Socioeconomic status usually refers to indicators such as income, education, and occupation. Those indicators can affect social standing, but they are not identical to the respect and voluntary deference that define interpersonal or group status in much of the social-psychological literature.
Why Psychology Often Confuses Power and Status
The confusion is understandable because power and status are positively associated in many real hierarchies. People who are respected are often entrusted with resources, leadership roles, or decision rights. People who control valued resources can acquire visibility and deference. Fiske, Dupree, Nicolas, and Swencionis describe power and status as correlated forms of hierarchy, and Magee and Galinsky explain how both can become self-reinforcing over time.
But correlation does not collapse the distinction. If two people occupy the same formal level, one may have much more status because colleagues trust that person’s judgment. If two people are equally admired, one may have far more power because only one controls a budget, a promotion, or access to a scarce resource. The empirical value of separating power from status is precisely that real social positions can combine them in different proportions.
The conceptual problem has become important enough to motivate a large contemporary measurement review. Körner, Overbeck, and Schütz (2025) systematically reviewed measures of power, status, dominance, and prestige, identified 67 validated scales, and showed that hierarchy terms have sometimes been used inconsistently at both the construct and measurement levels. A careful article therefore has to say which meaning of each term it is using rather than treating everyday vocabulary as a scientific taxonomy.
A Four-Position Map: Power and Status Can Combine Independently
A useful way to see the distinction is to imagine power and status as two axes rather than one ladder. This is a conceptual map, not a diagnostic test, but it reveals why a single “high rank versus low rank” label can hide psychologically important differences.
High power, high status
This person controls meaningful outcomes and is also respected. A senior professional may have authority over resources while colleagues voluntarily seek the person’s judgment. Decisions can be followed partly because consequences are attached to the role and partly because others regard the person as competent or trustworthy. Power and status reinforce one another, but the mechanisms remain analytically separable.
High power, low status
This person can affect other people’s outcomes but receives little respect or admiration. A gatekeeper may decide who gets access while being disliked. A supervisor may control scheduling or evaluation while being regarded as incompetent. In these cases compliance can occur without esteem. The possibility of high power with low status is one of the clearest demonstrations that power is not simply “high social standing.”
Low power, high status
This person is respected but lacks control over consequential resources. An admired expert, senior craftsperson, scholar, mentor, artist, or community elder may influence what people think and do because others value the person’s knowledge or reputation, even when that person cannot hire, fire, punish, allocate budgets, or compel compliance. Status can therefore create substantial voluntary influence without equivalent power.
Low power, low status
A newcomer with little decision control and little recognized standing may occupy neither form of high rank. Importantly, low power and low status still need to be assessed in a specific group and domain. A person who lacks both in one setting may possess either or both elsewhere.
Power and Status Both Produce Influence, but Through Different Routes
Power and status can both change other people’s behavior, which is why influence is often confused with both. Yet influence is better treated as the capacity or actual effect of changing another person’s thoughts, choices, or behavior, while power and status describe different bases from which influence can arise. Hasty and Maner explicitly describe both power and status as sources of influence while distinguishing the mechanism of control from the mechanism of respect.
A high-power actor can sometimes influence despite resistance because consequences are attached to compliance or refusal. A high-status actor often influences because others want to learn from, emulate, impress, or align with the person. In everyday life these routes can be mixed. An admired manager may be persuasive because employees respect her judgment and also powerful because she controls assignments.
Influence itself is broader than either construct. People can influence through argument quality, information, social networks, coalition building, emotional expression, norms, or expertise without possessing strong power or stable status. That is why “who influenced the outcome?” and “who had power?” are related but nonidentical questions.
Status, Prestige, and Dominance: Related Concepts With Different Jobs
Prestige and dominance belong to a neighboring research tradition that asks how people attain or maintain social rank. They are highly relevant to power-versus-status comparisons, but they should not be used as perfect synonyms for status and power. The distinction between a route to rank and the rank position that results is essential.
Prestige is a respect-based route to rank
In the influential evolutionary account by Henrich and Gil-White, prestige is built around freely conferred deference to people whose skills or knowledge make them valuable sources of social learning. Later research extended this approach. Cheng, Tracy, Foulsham, Kingstone, and Henrich found that prestige, operationalized around sharing expertise and gaining respect, was a route to social rank and influence distinct from dominance.
A broad review by Maner similarly describes prestige as a strategy of displaying valued knowledge and skills and earning respect. This makes prestige closely related to status because both center on social valuation and voluntary deference. Still, the terms are not interchangeable in every theory. Prestige is often modeled as a strategy, process, or basis for attaining rank, whereas status describes the respect-based standing that a person occupies.
Dominance is a coercive route to rank
Dominance refers to a different route. In the dominance-prestige literature, dominance involves coercion, intimidation, threat, or the capacity to impose costs. Cheng and colleagues found dominance and prestige to be distinct yet viable routes to rank and influence in their studies. Maner’s review likewise describes dominance as gaining or maintaining rank through coercion, intimidation, and power.
Dominance is therefore not simply another word for power. A dominance strategy can help someone acquire power or induce compliance, but power refers to the asymmetric capacity to control outcomes, not to one behavioral style. A person may possess substantial power while behaving quietly and non-dominantly. Conversely, someone may behave dominantly without actually controlling the resources that determine other people’s outcomes.
Why dominance does not equal low status
It is tempting to map dominance directly onto power and prestige directly onto status. That mapping captures a family resemblance but is too crude. Dominance can produce social rank and influence, and in some contexts a dominant person may also receive respect. Prestige can generate influence and may eventually be converted into formal decision power. The contemporary hierarchy literature increasingly treats power, status, dominance, and prestige as distinguishable constructs that can interact rather than as two interchangeable pairs.
Hierarchy and Rank: The Larger Structure
Hierarchy is the broader arrangement in which people or positions are unequally ranked. Power and status are two major bases of hierarchical differentiation. A contemporary academic overview in The Handbook of Social Psychology treats social hierarchy through power, status, and influence rather than collapsing all forms of rank into a single construct.
Rank means relative position on a dimension that matters in a group. The dimension might be decision control, respect, expertise, seniority, wealth, formal office, or something else. A group can therefore contain several partially overlapping hierarchies at once. The person highest in formal authority may not be highest in peer respect; the person most respected may not control resources; the person who dominates conversation may not be the person whose decisions bind the group.
This multi-dimensional view is especially useful in organizations. Organizational charts display formal roles, but informal status structures can cut across them. A junior employee may be the person everyone consults on a technical problem. A senior executive may possess formal power yet depend on a respected specialist for information that makes good decisions possible. The real hierarchy is often a configuration of several rank dimensions.
Power Is Not Authority, and Status Is Not Legitimacy
Authority concerns a recognized or legitimate right to direct, decide, or issue rules within a social order. Power concerns the capacity to affect outcomes. The two often coincide, but neither definition logically requires the other. Someone may have coercive or resource power without being regarded as having a legitimate right to use it; someone may hold a recognized office while lacking enough resources or enforcement capacity to make every directive effective.
Status is also not legitimacy. A person may be admired without having any recognized right to command. Conversely, an officeholder may possess legitimate authority while receiving little personal esteem. Keeping these dimensions separate prevents a common error in which “high status,” “high authority,” and “high power” are all treated as synonyms for “important person.”
Leadership is another neighboring concept. Leadership refers to processes of coordinating, directing, or influencing collective activity. Leaders can draw on power, authority, status, expertise, prestige, or several of these at once. A leadership role therefore does not by itself tell us which hierarchical mechanism is operating.
What Happens When Power and Status Do Not Match?
Power-status mismatch is theoretically revealing because it removes the usual correlation between the two constructs. Research on these mismatched positions suggests that high power without high status can produce a different interpersonal environment from high status without high power. The evidence is informative, but specific experimental findings should not be inflated into universal laws about people in particular occupations.
In a laboratory study, Fast, Halevy, and Galinsky (2012) independently manipulated power and status and found that participants placed in high-power, low-status roles selected more demeaning activities for partners than participants in the other role combinations. This is evidence from a specific experimental paradigm, not proof that every low-status powerholder becomes demeaning.
A separate pair of experiments by Fragale, Overbeck, and Neale (2011) examined how observers judged targets occupying different power-status combinations. High-power, low-status targets were judged as dominant but comparatively cold, while high-status targets were evaluated more positively. Again, these are social-perception findings under particular study conditions rather than a general character diagnosis.
More recent work has extended the mismatch question. Across four studies plus a supplemental study, Choi, Hong, Na, and Kim reported that holding power increased motivation for status more strongly than holding status increased motivation for power, and that power-status misalignment was associated in their paradigms with competitive responses by powerholders toward statusholders and lower group investment when status was not attained. The study strengthens the case that power and status are psychologically asymmetric, while still leaving room for context, culture, role design, and individual differences.
Power and Status Can Orient Social Attention Differently
One reason the distinction matters is that the two positions create different dependencies. A person with power may be less dependent on a particular other person because the powerholder controls valued outcomes. A person with status depends more directly on continued social valuation because status exists in other people’s judgments. Hasty and Maner’s review summarizes evidence linking power with enhanced goal pursuit and social distance, while linking status with vigilance for social disapproval.
Experimental research has also reported different patterns in perspective taking. Across five studies, Blader, Shirako, and Chen (2016) found higher status associated with greater perspective taking while higher power showed the opposite pattern in their paradigms. The result fits the idea that status maintenance requires attention to how one is evaluated by others. It should not be translated into the claim that every powerful person lacks empathy or that every high-status person is socially perceptive.
Related work on justice behavior found another contrast. In five studies, Blader and Chen (2012) reported opposing associations of status and power with distributive or procedural justice enacted toward others in their experimental designs. Such findings are one reason contemporary hierarchy research treats power and status as psychologically distinct rather than assuming that all high rank has the same consequences.
Power Does Not Automatically Create Status
Control over resources can make others pay attention, comply, or strategically flatter a powerholder. None of those responses necessarily demonstrates genuine respect. If deference disappears as soon as the power to reward or punish disappears, the behavior may have reflected dependence more than status. This distinction is useful whenever apparent admiration could instead be cautious compliance.
Power can nevertheless contribute to status when people interpret control over resources as evidence of competence, success, or importance, or when a powerful role creates opportunities to demonstrate valued qualities. Status can also contribute to power when respected individuals are entrusted with decisions or resources. The causal arrows can run in both directions, which helps explain why the constructs are correlated even though their definitions differ.
Status Does Not Automatically Create Power
Respect creates voluntary deference and can make a person highly influential, but it does not guarantee control over consequential resources. A respected colleague may shape what a team believes without being able to approve a budget. A celebrated scholar may influence a field while lacking administrative authority. A community figure may receive deference while having no formal mechanism to compel anyone.
Status can be converted into power if a group gives the respected person decision rights, resources, followers, or institutional authority. But the conversion is contingent. The distinction becomes especially visible when institutions deliberately separate expertise from decision authority—for example, when advisers recommend but executives decide.
Culture Changes How Power and Status Are Understood and Earned
Power and status are not expressed identically across cultural settings. A review by Torelli, Leslie, To, and Kim concludes that culture shapes how power and status are conceptualized, who attains them, and what consequences follow from them. This makes cross-cultural generalization an empirical question rather than an assumption.
The underlying distinction between control over valued outcomes and socially conferred esteem remains useful, but what counts as a valued resource, admirable conduct, competence, appropriate deference, or legitimate rank can vary across groups and cultures. A behavior that signals status in one context may be neutral or counterproductive in another.
Power distance is a separate construct and should not be confused with an individual’s amount of power. In cross-cultural research, power distance concerns beliefs or norms about unequal power relations and hierarchy; individual psychological measures of power distance are also studied. It is therefore conceptually different from asking whether one particular person has power or status. For the culture-level model, individual power distance orientation, and psychological power distance, see Power Distance: Hofstede, Hierarchy, Authority, and Psychological Power Distance.
How Researchers Should Measure Power and Status
The most important contemporary methodological lesson is simple: define the construct before choosing the measure. The Körner, Overbeck, and Schütz systematic review documents substantial variation in scales labeled power, status, dominance, and prestige and warns that the same label can conceal different content while different labels can measure overlapping content.
A power measure should capture some form of asymmetric control, dependence, resource access, decision capacity, or ability to alter others’ outcomes. A status measure should capture respect, esteem, admiration, social valuation, or voluntary deference. A dominance measure should not be assumed to measure power merely because dominant behavior sometimes produces power. A prestige measure should not be assumed to equal status merely because prestige frequently generates respect.
Self-reports also require caution. Feeling powerful, holding a formal role, controlling an actual resource, and being rated as powerful by peers are related but different operationalizations. Likewise, feeling respected, receiving peer-rated respect, occupying a prestigious occupation, and holding high socioeconomic status do not measure exactly the same thing. Good research makes the operational definition visible rather than hiding it behind a broad hierarchy label.
Power vs Status at Work
Workplaces make the distinction easy to observe because formal resource control and informal respect are often distributed differently. A manager can approve leave, assign projects, evaluate performance, or influence promotion; those capacities are forms of power. A veteran employee whom colleagues consult because of deep expertise may have high status even without formal supervisory authority. A founder may have both. A compliance officer or gatekeeper may have substantial power in a narrow domain while receiving little status outside it.
The distinction changes how workplace behavior should be interpreted. Speaking less around a decision-maker may reflect sensitivity to power because the person controls consequences. Carefully preserving a respected expert’s approval may reflect status dynamics because reputation and voluntary deference are involved. In practice the two can overlap, and communication skill matters in both. The Hub’s guide to assertiveness at work discusses speaking up and setting limits when workplace hierarchy affects what feels safe or costly to say.
Dominant communication should also not be confused with assertiveness. Assertiveness concerns expressing one’s needs, rights, or boundaries directly while respecting others; dominance concerns rank behavior and, in the dominance-prestige literature, can involve coercive strategies. See the Hub’s evidence-informed overview of assertiveness and how it differs from aggression.
Some employees respond to perceived hierarchy by over-accommodating, overcommitting, or avoiding disagreement. Those patterns do not reveal a person’s “true rank,” but they can interact with workplace power and status cues. The Hub’s article on people pleasing at work covers overcommitment, burnout, boundaries, and assertiveness without treating people pleasing as a diagnosis.
Power vs Status in Informal Groups
Informal groups can develop strong status hierarchies without formal offices. People learn whose knowledge is trusted, whose approval matters, who attracts attention, who can mobilize others, and who can impose social costs. These dimensions may generate a stable ranking even when nobody has an official title.
Power can also arise informally. A person who controls access to a network, crucial information, a scarce resource, or group membership may have power without a formal role. Conversely, the most admired member may have status but little capacity to determine outcomes. Asking who is respected and who controls dependencies often reveals two different maps of the same group.
Power vs Status in Close Relationships
Close relationships contain influence, dependence, respect, expertise, resource control, and negotiated roles, but reducing a relationship to a single rank score is usually misleading. One partner may control more money while the other has more influence over family routines; one may receive more social prestige in a community while the other has greater control over a specific household resource. Power is domain-specific and status is audience-specific.
In relationships, a power imbalance becomes clinically or ethically important when asymmetry affects autonomy, consent, safety, access to resources, or freedom to disagree. That is a different question from whether one partner is more admired. Respect and affection cannot by themselves erase material dependence, and material control cannot by itself prove that the controller has higher interpersonal status.
How to Tell Whether You Are Looking at Power or Status
When a hierarchy is ambiguous, begin with the mechanism rather than the label. Ask what would happen if the person lost everyone’s admiration but kept control over resources. If the person could still alter others’ outcomes, there is power. Then reverse the thought experiment: if the person lost formal control but remained respected and voluntarily deferred to, there is status.
Next ask what makes other people comply. Are they responding because refusal carries a cost, because cooperation brings a reward, because the person controls access, or because the person can decide? Those are power-relevant mechanisms. Are they responding because they trust the person’s competence, admire the person, value the person’s judgment, or want to learn from the person? Those are status-relevant mechanisms.
Then identify the domain. Someone can have power over scheduling but no power over professional reputation. Someone can have status as a technical expert but little status in organizational politics. Finally, separate the source of influence from the observed outcome. Two people may be equally influential while one achieves influence through resource control and the other through prestige.
Common Conceptual Mistakes
Mistake 1: Treating every hierarchy as one ladder
Groups can contain overlapping hierarchies of power, status, authority, expertise, seniority, popularity, wealth, and influence. Saying that someone is “higher” without specifying the dimension can obscure the mechanism that actually matters.
Mistake 2: Treating formal title as proof of status
A title can grant authority or power, but status depends on social valuation. A formal leader can be respected, tolerated, feared, ignored, admired, or distrusted. The title alone does not answer the status question.
Mistake 3: Treating admiration as proof of power
Admiration can generate influence but does not necessarily create control over resources or outcomes. Celebrities, experts, scholars, or respected peers can be high status in a domain without having power over those who admire them.
Mistake 4: Treating dominance as a personality diagnosis
Dominance is studied as a behavior, strategy, motive, interpersonal tendency, or hierarchy-related construct depending on the literature. It is not a clinical diagnosis. A dominant act also does not prove that a person possesses stable social power.
Mistake 5: Treating prestige as identical to status
Prestige is closely connected to respect-based status, but many theories use prestige to describe a route or strategy through which status is earned. Status describes standing; prestige often describes why that standing is granted. Researchers should follow the definitions used in the specific study rather than assume complete equivalence.
Mistake 6: Treating socioeconomic status as interpersonal status
Income, education, and occupation can shape perceived standing, but socioeconomic status is not the same construct as respect and voluntary deference in a group. The distinction matters whenever a study moves between population-level inequality and face-to-face hierarchy.
What the Evidence Supports — and What It Does Not
The strongest conclusion is conceptual: power and status are separable dimensions of social hierarchy, and modern research benefits from measuring them separately. Reviews across social psychology, organizational behavior, and hierarchy research converge on the distinction between control over valued outcomes and socially conferred respect.
The evidence also supports treating dominance and prestige as distinct hierarchy-related constructs or routes rather than synonyms. Experimental and observational studies show that people can attain rank and influence through coercive/dominance-related and respect/prestige-related pathways. However, the exact relationship among dominance, prestige, power, and status varies by theoretical framework and operationalization.
Research further suggests that power and status can have different psychological consequences. Findings on perspective taking, justice behavior, social judgment, and power-status mismatch are consistent with this idea. But these effects are conditional rather than personality destinies. Power does not automatically make a person cold, unjust, or insensitive, and status does not automatically make a person fair, empathic, or wise. Role demands, accountability, culture, goals, relationships, and individual differences can alter behavior.
The field’s own measurement problems are part of the evidence. The 2025 systematic review demonstrates why broad claims based on the word “power” or “status” alone should be read carefully. Before comparing studies, readers need to know what researchers actually manipulated or measured.
Why the Distinction Matters
For science, separating power from status prevents construct contamination. It allows researchers to ask whether an effect comes from resource control, respect, coercive behavior, prestige, formal authority, or some combination. That precision improves theory and makes apparently conflicting findings easier to interpret.
For organizations, the distinction explains why formal charts can fail to predict real influence. A manager can have decision power but depend on high-status specialists for cooperation and expertise. Informal status can stabilize a team, challenge formal power, or become a pathway into formal leadership. Diagnosing only titles misses much of the hierarchy that employees actually navigate.
For everyday life, the distinction helps people identify why another person’s opinion carries weight. Sometimes there are consequences for ignoring the person. Sometimes there is admiration. Sometimes there is expertise. Sometimes there is legitimate authority. Sometimes there is fear. Naming the mechanism is more informative than calling all of it “power.”
FAQ
What is the main difference between power and status in psychology?
Power is primarily about asymmetric control over valued resources, decisions, or outcomes; status is primarily about respect, admiration, esteem, and voluntary deference. They often correlate but remain distinct constructs. This distinction is central to Magee and Galinsky’s hierarchy framework and is reinforced by the 2025 systematic review of hierarchy concepts.
Can someone have power without status?
Yes. A person can control access, resources, punishment, schedules, decisions, or opportunities without being respected. High-power, low-status positions are important in experimental research precisely because they show that control and esteem can be separated.
Can someone have status without power?
Yes. A respected expert, mentor, artist, scholar, elder, or informal group member can receive attention and voluntary deference without controlling resources or having a formal right to command. The person may be influential because of status while possessing little direct power.
Is prestige the same as status?
They overlap strongly but are not always identical. Prestige is commonly used for a respect-based route to rank grounded in valued skill, knowledge, or contribution. Status is the socially conferred standing—respect, admiration, and deference—that a person holds. Some literatures use the terms more closely than others, so the study’s operational definition matters.
Is dominance the same as power?
No. Dominance generally refers to coercive or intimidating behavior, strategy, motive, or rank-related tendency depending on the framework. Power refers to control over outcomes or resources. Dominance can be used to acquire or express power, but powerful people do not need to behave dominantly, and dominant behavior does not guarantee actual power.
Is status the same as popularity?
No. Popularity, liking, visibility, and status can overlap, but status centers on respect, social valuation, and deference. A person can be widely liked without being treated as a high-status authority or expert, and a high-status person can be respected without being personally popular.
Is status the same as socioeconomic status?
No. Socioeconomic status usually describes structural or demographic position using indicators such as income, education, and occupation. Social-psychological status often describes respect and voluntary deference within a group. SES may shape status, but the constructs are not interchangeable.
Does having power make people less empathic?
Some studies and reviews report reduced perspective taking or greater social distance under certain power conditions, while other work identifies moderators such as goals and responsibility. The safest conclusion is that power can change social attention under particular conditions; it does not establish a fixed personality trait. Research separating power from status is especially important here because status has shown different effects on perspective taking.
Which matters more, power or status?
There is no context-free answer. Power matters when control over outcomes and dependence determine what people can do. Status matters when respect, reputation, voluntary deference, and social valuation determine influence. Many positions combine both, and their relative importance depends on the group, task, institution, and relationship.