Social Power: Definition, Types, French and Raven, Keltner, and Modern Psychology
Updated: 4 days ago
Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: September 24, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Social power is the capacity to shape another person’s outcomes, choices, beliefs, or behavior within a social relationship. In modern psychology, the concept is usually treated as relational rather than as a fixed possession: a person has power to the extent that other people’s valued outcomes depend on resources, decisions, information, opportunities, sanctions, or forms of recognition that the person can control. Power can therefore exist without being exercised, and influence can occur without the influencer holding broad or durable power.
That distinction sounds simple, but it resolves much of the confusion around the word. Social power is not the same thing as status, dominance, prestige, authority, leadership, confidence, personal control, or the desire for power. These constructs can overlap, and they can reinforce one another, but contemporary research increasingly treats them as separable. Reviews of social hierarchy, for example, define power primarily in terms of control over valued resources and outcomes, while status concerns respect and esteem in the eyes of others (Magee & Galinsky, 2008; van Kleef & Cheng, 2020).
The psychology of social power has several major intellectual lines. The French–Raven tradition asks where power comes from: reward, coercion, legitimacy, expertise, identification, and information. The power-dependence tradition asks why one actor is more powerful than another: dependence is greater when valued outcomes are controlled by the other party and alternatives are scarce. The approach–inhibition theory associated with Dacher Keltner and colleagues asks what being relatively powerful or powerless may do to attention, emotion, cognition, and action. More recent models emphasize goal activation, social distance, context, culture, and the need to keep power distinct from status rather than treating all forms of rank as one psychological variable.
This article owns that broad scientific construct. It explains what social power means, how its major theories fit together, what psychologists have found about its effects, where the evidence remains conditional, and how to distinguish power from nearby concepts without collapsing them into one idea.
What Is Social Power in Psychology?
In its classic social-psychological formulation, power is potential influence. In the original 1959 chapter by John R. P. French Jr. and Bertram Raven, power is defined in terms of the maximum potential influence one person can exert on another within a specified domain. Their formulation is explicitly relational: the same person can have substantial power over one target or outcome and very little power over another (French & Raven, 1959).
This matters because everyday language often treats power as if it were a personal substance: someone “has power,” another person “lacks power,” and a third person “is powerful.” Psychological analysis is more precise. Power depends on a relation between an actor, a target, and an outcome or domain. A supervisor may control work assignments but have little influence over an employee’s private political opinions. A physician may have expert power regarding treatment but no legitimate authority over a patient’s unrelated financial decisions. A highly respected colleague may have considerable referent or expert influence while possessing almost no formal authority.
A modern resource-control definition reaches a similar conclusion from another angle. Social power is often described as asymmetric control over valued resources or outcomes. A resource can be material, social, informational, symbolic, or institutional. What makes it a source of power is not simply that one person possesses it, but that another person values an outcome connected to it and lacks equally attractive alternatives. This relational perspective is central to classic power-dependence theory and remains influential in current social-hierarchy research (Emerson, 1962; Smith & Magee, 2015).
Social power can therefore be described through four questions:
• Who can affect whom?
• Which outcomes or resources are at stake?
• How dependent is the target on the power holder?
• What alternatives, constraints, norms, and countervailing resources exist?
Power is rarely global. It is usually domain-specific, relationship-specific, and partly contingent on context.
Power Is Potential; Influence Is What Happens
Power and influence are closely connected, but they are not synonyms.
Power refers to capacity or potential. Influence refers to a change that actually occurs in another person’s attitudes, beliefs, emotions, decisions, or behavior. A manager may have the power to withhold a desirable assignment without ever using that leverage. A friend may influence another friend through a persuasive argument even though the relationship contains little enduring asymmetry in power.
French and Raven built this distinction into their framework. Their interest was not only in whether a target changed, but in why the target changed and whether that change would persist when the influencing person was absent. The source of influence matters because different bases of power can create different forms of dependence, resistance, internalization, and durability (French & Raven, 1959; Raven, 1993).
This is one reason “powerful person” can be a misleading shorthand. Someone may possess formal authority yet repeatedly fail to influence a group. Someone else may lack formal authority but become highly influential because people trust their expertise, identify with them, or depend on information they provide.
Why Social Power Is Relational: Dependence, Alternatives, and Asymmetry
Richard Emerson’s classic power-dependence theory treated power as a property of social relations rather than a property located entirely inside one person. The central idea is straightforward: A’s power over B increases as B becomes more dependent on A. Dependence rises when B values outcomes that A can provide and when B has few good alternatives for obtaining those outcomes elsewhere (Emerson, 1962).
Consider a workplace. A supervisor may control access to promotion, desirable projects, schedules, or evaluations. That control creates potential power. But its magnitude depends on the employee’s dependence. If the employee has strong outside options, scarce expertise, institutional protections, or access to multiple decision-makers, the supervisor’s leverage may be limited. If the employee has few alternatives and the supervisor controls highly valued outcomes, the asymmetry becomes greater.
The same logic appears in relationships, organizations, groups, and institutions. Power can be reciprocal: each party may control outcomes valued by the other. It can also be highly asymmetric. And it can shift when alternatives change. A new job offer, new expertise, a changed social network, a legal protection, or access to previously scarce information can alter a power relation without changing anyone’s personality.
This dependence-based view also helps explain why power dynamics cannot be inferred from titles alone. Formal roles are one source of power, but dependence can be created by expertise, gatekeeping, social connections, information, emotional significance, control of scarce resources, or the ability to impose costs.
French and Raven: The Classic Bases of Social Power
Evidence status: historical social-psychological theory with extensive later application and elaboration.
French and Raven’s 1959 chapter is one of the foundational texts in the psychology of social power. The original paper identified five especially important bases: reward, coercive, legitimate, referent, and expert power. Informational power was added in Raven’s later development of the framework, producing the familiar six-base version used today (French & Raven, 1959; Raven, 1993).
A “base” of power is the relationship or condition from which the capacity to influence arises. The six bases are not six personality types, and a person is not limited to one of them. The same relationship can contain several bases simultaneously.
Reward Power
Reward power comes from the perceived ability to provide valued benefits or remove unwanted conditions. Examples include access to money, promotion, desirable assignments, privileges, approval, opportunities, or other outcomes the target values.
The important word is perceived. A reward does not have to be delivered for reward power to exist. The target must believe that the actor can mediate the reward. The value of the reward, the credibility of the promise, and the target’s alternatives all affect the strength of this power (French & Raven, 1959).
Reward power is not identical to positive reinforcement in behavior analysis. French and Raven were describing a social relation between an influencing agent and a target, not proposing a complete learning theory.
Coercive Power
Coercive power comes from the perceived ability to impose costs, punishments, losses, or aversive consequences. Threats to pay, access, reputation, membership, opportunity, approval, or security can all function as coercive resources when the actor is seen as able to carry them out.
Coercive power often produces compliance that remains dependent on surveillance or the continuing possibility of punishment. French and Raven explicitly distinguished this from deeper internalization: behavior may change because the target wants to avoid a cost, even if the target’s private beliefs do not change (French & Raven, 1959).
Coercion is one route to power, not the definition of power itself. Equating all power with coercion erases legitimate, expert, referent, informational, and reward-based influence.
Legitimate Power
Legitimate power arises when the target accepts that the actor has a right to prescribe certain behavior or make certain decisions within a domain. Formal office is the obvious example, but Raven’s later work broadened legitimate power beyond position alone. Norms of reciprocity, equity, responsibility, and accepted social obligations can also create perceived legitimacy (Raven, 1993).
Legitimate power is therefore related to authority but is not identical to every form of power. A judge, teacher, physician, supervisor, or team captain may possess legitimate power within bounded roles. The legitimacy may disappear outside those boundaries.
Legitimacy also depends on recognition. A title can create formal authority, yet psychological compliance may weaken if people reject the office-holder’s right to direct the relevant behavior.
Expert Power
Expert power comes from the target’s belief that the actor has valuable knowledge, skill, competence, or experience. It is domain-specific. A software engineer may possess expert power in a technical decision and little expert power in a medical one.
Expert power can exist without formal rank. It also depends on credibility: the target must believe that the expertise is relevant and trustworthy. Research developing measures of French–Raven bases has treated expert power as empirically distinguishable from legitimate, referent, reward, and coercive power (Hinkin & Schriesheim, 1989).
Referent Power
Referent power arises from identification, attraction, affiliation, admiration, or a desire to maintain a valued relationship with the influencing person or group. People may change behavior because they want to resemble, please, belong with, or remain connected to a valued social target.
This makes referent power especially easy to confuse with status or prestige. They can overlap, but the concepts are not identical. Status refers broadly to respect and esteem within a group or social hierarchy. Referent power describes a source of influence rooted in identification or relational attraction. High status can increase referent power, but referent influence can also exist in close relationships without broad social status.
Informational Power
Informational power rests on the persuasive force of information itself: reasons, evidence, explanations, or arguments that change the target’s understanding of a situation. Raven later distinguished informational power from expert power. Expert power depends on acceptance of the source’s expertise; informational power can persist after the source disappears because the target has accepted the content of the information (Raven, 1993).
This is a crucial distinction. If a person accepts a recommendation only because “the expert said so,” influence remains dependent on the source’s expert standing. If the person understands and accepts the reasons, the resulting change can become more independent of the source.
What the French–Raven Framework Does and Does Not Explain
The six bases answer a specific question: what is the source of an actor’s capacity to influence a target?
They do not by themselves explain every psychological effect of having power. They do not tell us that one base is always ethical or unethical, effective or ineffective, democratic or authoritarian. Reward can be used manipulatively or fairly. Expertise can be genuine or falsely perceived. Legitimate authority can be accepted or challenged. Information can enlighten or mislead. Coercion can range from ordinary rule enforcement to severe abuse.
Raven’s later work expanded the model because real influence episodes often combine multiple bases and unfold strategically over time. His power/interaction model considered motives, assessment of available power resources, choice of influence strategy, implementation, resistance, aftereffects, and subsequent adjustments (Raven, 1993).
For modern readers, the most useful interpretation is therefore structural rather than typological: French and Raven provide a vocabulary for identifying why influence is possible in a particular relationship.
Keltner’s Approach–Inhibition Theory of Power
Evidence status: influential psychological theory with substantial empirical research, later refinements, and context-dependent effects.
A different research tradition asks what relative power does to the person who holds it. Dacher Keltner, Deborah Gruenfeld, and Cameron Anderson proposed the approach–inhibition theory of power in 2003. The theory begins with an asymmetry in social environments: high-power positions tend to provide greater access to rewards and freedom from constraint, while low-power positions tend to increase exposure to threat, punishment, dependence, and social constraint. The authors proposed that these conditions shift motivational systems. Higher power should generally activate approach-related tendencies; lower power should generally activate inhibition-related tendencies (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003).
In broad terms, approach orientation is associated with movement toward goals and rewards, action, positive affect, and reduced restraint. Inhibition is associated with vigilance, attention to threat and constraint, caution, and behavioral restraint. The original theory generated predictions about emotion, attention, information processing, and social behavior.
Early experimental work found preliminary support. In dyadic studies, participants with greater resource control or dominance showed patterns consistent with increased approach and reduced inhibition, including greater expression of their attitudes and stronger attention to potential rewards (Anderson & Berdahl, 2002). Other experiments reported that structural or experimentally primed power increased action orientation across different tasks (Galinsky, Gruenfeld, & Magee, 2003).
A 2020 review by Minha Cho and Dacher Keltner summarized 16 years of research on four central propositions of the theory: affect, attention to rewards versus threats, cognitive processing, and disinhibited versus constrained behavior. The review concluded that the framework had received substantial empirical support while also being refined as researchers identified boundary conditions and more complex effects (Cho & Keltner, 2020).
The theory should not be read as a deterministic rule that powerful people become impulsive while powerless people become inhibited. Power effects depend on goals, roles, accountability, identity, culture, chronic versus temporary power, and how power is operationalized. Contemporary work increasingly treats power as a change in motivational and relational conditions rather than a switch that produces one universal personality.
Guinote: Power as Goal Activation and Flexible Goal Pursuit
Evidence status: integrative review and contemporary theoretical synthesis.
Ana Guinote’s influential review reframed many apparently inconsistent findings by proposing that power intensifies goal-related approach motivation. On this view, power does not simply make people more selfish, less thoughtful, more confident, or more reckless. Instead, it can increase the ability and tendency to act on whichever goals are currently active and relevant to the person’s role, dispositions, opportunities, and situation (Guinote, 2017).
This helps explain why the psychological effects of power can look contradictory. A person with a self-interested goal may use increased freedom and action orientation in self-serving ways. A person with a strong responsibility or collective goal may become more effective at pursuing that goal. Power can facilitate selective attention to goal-relevant information, prioritization, self-expression, and action, yet it can also reduce attention to people or information that are not currently relevant to the power holder’s focal goal.
The “power corrupts” slogan therefore captures only a subset of possible outcomes. Social power can enable harmful behavior by reducing constraints and increasing goal pursuit, but it can also enable prosocial, protective, creative, or institutionally responsible behavior when those are the goals and norms that organize action. The empirical question is not simply whether power is good or bad. It is what power changes in the motivational and social environment, which goals become focal, and what constraints remain.
Power, Social Distance, and Attention to Other People
Research on the interpersonal consequences of power suggests that asymmetrical dependence can alter social attention. Reviews have proposed that higher power can increase subjective independence and social distance, while lower power can increase dependence and therefore the need to monitor more powerful others (Smith & Magee, 2015).
This asymmetry makes intuitive sense. A person whose outcomes depend heavily on a supervisor, gatekeeper, evaluator, or partner may have strong incentives to monitor that person’s moods, preferences, and intentions. The more powerful party may have less instrumental need to monitor the less powerful party with the same intensity.
But “less attention” is not equivalent to an inability to understand others. Motivation matters. Power holders can attend carefully to subordinates, clients, students, patients, or constituents when doing so serves a valued goal, a professional norm, a moral commitment, or an accountability structure. Guinote’s goal-focused account and later reviews both emphasize that power effects are often contingent rather than automatic (Guinote, 2017; Hasty & Maner, 2020).
A 2026 Development: The Social Relations–Approach Theory
Evidence status: newly proposed psychological theory, not a settled consensus.
In 2026, Nicholas Hays, Alice Lee, Steven Blader, and Adam Galinsky proposed the social relations–approach theory of social hierarchy. Their framework is important because it directly addresses a recurring problem in older research: power and status were often correlated in real life and sometimes blurred in theory, even though they can produce different psychological experiences.
The theory proposes two dimensions. Along a social-relations dimension, status is associated with more symmetric interdependence across rank levels, whereas power involves asymmetric interdependence: relatively powerful people experience greater independence and relatively powerless people greater dependence. Along an approach dimension, both higher status and higher power can increase approach orientation, but through different relational mechanisms (Hays et al., 2026).
The value of this model for a general account of social power is conceptual precision. A person may be high in status and low in power, high in power and low in status, high in both, or low in both. Treating these combinations as psychologically identical can obscure what is actually producing an effect.
Because the model is new, it should be treated as a contemporary theoretical proposal rather than as an established final account of hierarchy.
Social Power Is Not the Same as Status
Power and status are two major but distinct forms of social rank.
Power concerns control over valued resources and outcomes, creating asymmetry in dependence. Status concerns respect, admiration, and esteem conferred by others. A person can therefore possess status without substantial control over resources, and can possess control over resources without being respected (Magee & Galinsky, 2008; Hasty & Maner, 2020).
Examples make the distinction clear:
• A beloved senior scientist may have high status because colleagues admire the scientist’s contributions, even if the scientist controls few budgets or appointments.
• A bureaucratic gatekeeper may have high power over a specific process because they control access or approval, even if they have little prestige.
• A chief executive can have both high power and high status.
• A temporary administrator can have formal power but low status.
• A celebrated public figure can have high status while lacking direct authority over the people who admire them.
The concepts often correlate because respected people are given opportunities and resources, while resource controllers can acquire deference. Yet the correlation is incomplete and culturally variable. Research has shown that cultural orientations can change how strongly observers infer status from power and power from status (To et al., 2020).
For a dedicated comparison of the two hierarchy constructs, see Power vs Status: Social Power, Prestige, Dominance, and Hierarchy.
Social Power Is Not the Same as Authority
Authority is power that is understood as legitimate within a social or institutional order. A teacher’s classroom authority, a court’s legal authority, and a manager’s authority over defined workplace decisions depend on accepted rules or roles.
Power is broader. Coercive leverage, control of scarce information, social dependence, expertise, or informal gatekeeping can create power without legitimate authority. Conversely, someone may hold formal authority while having limited practical power if subordinates possess strong alternatives, ignore the office, control essential expertise, or can block implementation.
French and Raven’s legitimate power captures part of this distinction: legitimacy is one basis of social power, not the whole category of power (French & Raven, 1959).
Social Power Is Not the Same as Dominance or Prestige
Dominance and prestige describe different routes to social rank and influence. In an influential research program, dominance refers to attaining rank through force, intimidation, or the capacity to impose costs; prestige refers to rank granted because others value a person’s expertise, competence, or knowledge. Both can create influence, but they rely on different social processes (Cheng et al., 2013).
Dominance overlaps most obviously with coercive capacity, but dominance is not synonymous with social power. A person can have substantial legitimate or expert power without behaving dominantly. Prestige overlaps with status and can support referent or expert power, but prestige is not the same thing as control over outcomes.
The distinction also matters for motivation. Research on social power motives has separated desires for dominance, prestige, and leadership, showing that wanting influence can take psychologically different forms (Suessenbach et al., 2019). That literature concerns power motivation—why people seek influence—not the general definition of social power itself.
Social Power Is Not the Same as Personal Control
Personal control concerns perceived or actual control over one’s own outcomes. Social power concerns control over outcomes that matter to other people.
The two often correlate. A powerful person may have greater autonomy and fewer constraints, while a powerless person may experience less control over personal circumstances. But they can diverge. A caregiver can have significant decision power over another person while feeling little control over their own workload. An independent freelancer may enjoy high personal control while holding little power over other people.
Separating these constructs prevents a common measurement error: asking whether someone feels “in control” does not necessarily measure social power.
Objective Power and the Subjective Sense of Power
Another distinction separates social structure from subjective experience.
A person can occupy a role that objectively controls resources yet feel unable to influence others. Another person may have modest formal resources but experience a strong sense of interpersonal power. Cameron Anderson, Oliver John, and Dacher Keltner studied this subjective sense of power across multiple samples. They found that it is coherent within contexts, moderately related across different relationships, and shaped by both social-structural factors and personality characteristics such as dominance (Anderson, John, & Keltner, 2012).
This means researchers must specify what they are measuring. A formal position, resource control, perceived influence, subjective sense of power, and observed influence behavior are not interchangeable indicators.
The distinction is especially important when interpreting experiments. A laboratory manipulation may temporarily alter a participant’s sense of power without reproducing the long-term institutional dependencies that characterize a workplace, family, organization, or state. Conversely, structural power can exist even when the holder does not consciously feel powerful.
How People Acquire Social Power
There is no single route to social power because power can arise from different kinds of dependence.
One route is control over material or institutional resources. This includes money, jobs, promotion, housing, access, schedules, permissions, credentials, or other outcomes. Another route is control over social resources such as approval, belonging, reputation, inclusion, or access to influential networks. Expertise creates power when others need knowledge they do not possess. Information creates power when access to relevant facts, explanations, or channels is unequal. Formal roles create legitimate power when people accept the right attached to the role. Identification and admiration can create referent influence.
Power can also emerge from network position. A person who connects otherwise separated groups, controls a bottleneck, or serves as the only route to a valued resource may gain leverage even without a prestigious title.
The key principle is dependence. Resources create power only to the extent that they matter to someone and are not easily replaced. This is why alternatives are so important in power-dependence theory (Emerson, 1962).
Social Power Can Be Mutual
Power differences are often discussed as if one side has power and the other has none. Many relationships are better described as systems of reciprocal dependence.
An employee may depend on a manager for evaluation while the manager depends on the employee’s scarce expertise. A patient may depend on a clinician for medical knowledge while the clinician depends on the patient’s consent, accurate information, and cooperation. Two organizations may control different resources that the other needs. Partners may each hold different relational, financial, practical, or social resources.
Reciprocal power does not necessarily produce equality. One party may still be more dependent overall. But analyzing both directions prevents a simplistic “powerful versus powerless” picture and highlights how bargaining, coalition formation, alternatives, and institutional rules can rebalance a relationship.
What Does Social Power Do to Psychology?
The strongest contemporary answer is conditional: social power changes the opportunities, constraints, dependencies, and motivational environment in which people think and act. Those changes can alter attention, emotion, cognition, action, and social judgment, but the direction and magnitude of effects depend on goals and context.
Several patterns recur in the literature.
Power Can Increase Action Orientation
Experimental studies have repeatedly linked higher power with greater readiness to act. Galinsky and colleagues found that structural or primed power increased action across tasks, including situations where action had prosocial or antisocial consequences. That finding is important because it suggests that power may amplify action rather than dictate its moral direction (Galinsky, Gruenfeld, & Magee, 2003).
This pattern fits both the approach–inhibition theory and Guinote’s goal-focused account. Greater power can reduce some external constraints, increase access to resources, and strengthen pursuit of focal goals (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003; Guinote, 2017).
Power Can Shift Attention Toward Goals and Rewards
The approach–inhibition framework predicts that high power increases attention to rewards and goal opportunities, while low power increases attention to threats, punishment, and social constraints. Later reviews report substantial support for this broad pattern while also emphasizing moderators and revisions (Cho & Keltner, 2020).
Again, this does not mean high-power people always ignore threats or low-power people are incapable of pursuing rewards. It describes probabilistic tendencies produced by different social conditions.
Power Can Increase Independence From Immediate Social Pressure
When people control more of their own and others’ outcomes, they may become less dependent on approval or immediate social cues. This can increase authentic self-expression and reduce conformity to situational pressure in some contexts. It can also make a person less attentive to feedback that would otherwise constrain behavior.
Guinote’s review describes power as amplifying active aspects of the self and facilitating selective goal pursuit rather than simply increasing one fixed trait (Guinote, 2017).
Low Power Can Increase Vigilance to Powerful Others
Dependence creates information needs. When another person controls outcomes that matter to you, monitoring that person can become adaptive. Reviews of the interpersonal nature of power argue that lower-power individuals often have stronger incentives to attend to higher-power individuals, while higher-power actors may experience greater social distance (Smith & Magee, 2015).
This pattern can matter in workplaces, classrooms, families, healthcare, and other hierarchical settings. It helps explain why the person with less power may be acutely aware of subtle cues that the person with more power barely notices.
Power Can Affect Social Judgment
Power and status shape how people perceive and evaluate others, but they do so through partly different processes. Reviews suggest that power-related judgments often reflect enhanced goal pursuit and social distance, whereas status-related judgments are more closely tied to maintaining approval and avoiding social disapproval (Hasty & Maner, 2020).
This is another reason not to treat “high rank” as a single psychological condition.
Does Power Reduce Empathy or Perspective Taking?
Some influential studies and reviews have associated power with reduced social attention, perspective taking, or sensitivity to others under certain conditions. Guinote’s review, for example, discusses evidence linking power to reduced attention to people who are not relevant to focal goals and to forms of objectification in some contexts (Guinote, 2017).
The strongest interpretation is contextual rather than absolute. Power can reduce the instrumental need to attend to others because the power holder is less dependent on them. But goals can reverse the pattern. A clinician, leader, parent, teacher, or manager whose focal goal requires accurate understanding of another person may devote substantial attention to that person. Accountability, norms, role expectations, identity, and culture can all change how power is expressed.
It is therefore safer to say that power can alter incentives for social attention than to claim that power mechanically destroys empathy.
Does Power Make People Selfish?
No single answer is supported across contexts.
Power can enable self-interested action because it provides resources and reduces constraints. It can also enable prosocial action for exactly the same structural reason. A person with power has greater capacity to implement whatever goals are active. This is one of the central insights of goal-oriented accounts of power (Guinote, 2017).
A self-focused goal can therefore become more consequential under power. So can a responsibility-focused goal. Institutional design matters because it shapes which goals are rewarded, what information reaches the power holder, how much accountability exists, and how easily less powerful people can challenge decisions.
This is why “power corrupts” should be treated as a broad cultural proposition rather than as a complete psychological law. Corruption, entitlement, moral behavior, and abuse of power are major research topics in their own right and require more specific evidence than the general social-power construct can provide.
Why Power Effects Vary
A central lesson of modern research is that the effects of power are heterogeneous.
They vary because “power” is operationalized in multiple ways: actual control over resources, formal role, rank, experimentally assigned control, recalled experiences, subjective sense of power, or temporary priming. These manipulations are related but not equivalent.
Effects also depend on:
• the power holder’s active goals;
• whether power is legitimate or contested;
• accountability and surveillance;
• dependence on subordinates or peers;
• strength of institutional norms;
• cultural expectations;
• whether power is stable or temporary;
• whether the person also has high or low status;
• individual differences;
• the stakes and domain of the decision.
A large review of power research explicitly emphasizes inconsistencies that become more intelligible when power holders are treated as flexible goal pursuers rather than as people transformed in one uniform direction (Guinote, 2017).
Power and Status Can Combine in Different Ways
Modern hierarchy research increasingly studies combinations of power and status.
High power plus high status may provide both resource control and social approval. High power plus low status can create a very different experience: an actor can control outcomes while lacking respect. Low power plus high status can describe respected experts, symbolic figures, or senior members who receive deference but do not control many resources. Low power plus low status creates yet another condition.
The new social relations–approach theory argues that these combinations matter because power and status share some approach-related properties while differing in social interdependence (Hays et al., 2026). This is currently a developing theoretical framework, but it crystallizes a broader trend in the field: stop using power, status, hierarchy, dominance, and prestige as interchangeable labels.
Culture Shapes What Power Means
Most classic social-power theories were developed in Western academic contexts. Cross-cultural research shows that both the meaning and consequences of power can vary.
A 2020 review concluded that culture affects how power and status are conceptualized, how people attain them, and how they are used. In more individualistic settings, power is more likely to be understood in personalized, self-focused terms; in more collectivistic settings, power may be understood in more socialized, other-focused terms. The same review emphasizes that cultural orientation influences preferences for power versus status and expectations of power holders (Torelli et al., 2020).
Related research found that cultural orientations change how strongly observers connect power with status. In some contexts, controlling resources strongly implies status; in others, respect and control are more separable (To et al., 2020).
The implication is methodological as well as theoretical. A finding about social power in one cultural setting should not automatically be treated as a universal description of hierarchy everywhere.
A Contemporary Debate: Is Resource Control Too Narrow a Definition?
Evidence status: current conceptual debate.
The dominant modern definition of interpersonal power emphasizes asymmetric control over valued resources and outcomes. It is useful because it is relational, measurable, and distinguishes power from status. But researchers continue to debate whether this definition captures the full range of power in communities, groups, institutions, and societies.
A 2026 British Journal of Social Psychology article by Karim Bettache, Giovanni Travaglino, and Peter Beattie argues for a broader reconceptualization of power as plural, dynamic, and culturally embedded. Drawing on a special issue spanning groups, communities, and nations, the authors argue that resource-control definitions can miss forms of power produced through ideology, collective processes, norms, and cultural meaning (Bettache, Travaglino, & Beattie, 2026).
This should be read as a contemporary theoretical proposal, not as evidence that the resource-control model has been discarded. The field currently contains multiple levels of analysis. Interpersonal psychology often benefits from a precise dependence-and-resource definition; broader social psychology may need additional concepts to explain collective, institutional, cultural, and ideological power.
How Social Power Is Studied
There is no single gold-standard measure of social power because researchers study different aspects of the construct.
Structural Power Manipulations
Researchers can assign participants to roles that control valued resources, decisions, or outcomes. These designs are useful because they create a concrete asymmetry. They may resemble some real power relations more closely than abstract priming tasks, but laboratory stakes remain limited.
Recall and Priming Procedures
Participants may be asked to recall an experience of having power or lacking power, or may be exposed to cues intended to activate power-related concepts. Such procedures have been common in social psychology, including influential early work on power and action (Galinsky, Gruenfeld, & Magee, 2003).
Priming methods require careful interpretation. A temporary psychological state induced in a laboratory does not reproduce the full structure of chronic organizational, relational, or institutional power. More generally, debates about social priming have emphasized the importance of precise manipulations, replication, and boundary conditions rather than assuming that all priming effects are equally robust.
Self-Reported Sense of Power
Researchers may measure whether people feel able to influence others, get their way, or control outcomes in a relationship or group. The Personal Sense of Power scale developed by Anderson and colleagues is a prominent example (Anderson, John, & Keltner, 2012).
This measures subjective power, not resource control itself.
Measures of Power Bases
Organizational and applied researchers have developed scales to assess French–Raven bases such as reward, coercive, legitimate, expert, and referent power. Hinkin and Schriesheim’s multi-study scale-development work is one example showing that these bases can be measured as distinguishable perceptions (Hinkin & Schriesheim, 1989).
Naturalistic Rank and Role
Studies can use actual organizational positions, supervisory roles, resource control, network position, observed influence, or real-world decision authority. These measures increase ecological relevance but introduce selection effects: people who attain powerful roles may already differ from people who do not.
For this reason, the strongest conclusions usually come from convergence across methods rather than from treating any one operationalization as “power” in the abstract.
Why Measurement Matters
If one study manipulates resource control, another measures subjective confidence, and a third compares job titles, their results may not be directly comparable. All three may be described as studies of power, yet they are testing different components.
This is one source of apparent contradiction in the literature. It is also why modern reviews increasingly call for conceptual precision. Power can mean potential influence, asymmetric resource control, a subjective sense of influence, a structural position, or a specific base of influence. Those meanings overlap, but scientific interpretation improves when researchers name the exact construct they have manipulated or measured.
Examples of Social Power in Everyday Life
Examples are most useful when they specify the source of power rather than merely naming a “powerful person.”
Workplace
A manager controls assignments and evaluations. That may create legitimate, reward, and coercive power. A senior engineer with no managerial title may hold expert and informational power. A highly trusted colleague may exert referent influence. An employee with scarce skills and multiple job offers may reduce the manager’s leverage by reducing dependence.
Workplace power therefore cannot be read directly from the organization chart. Formal hierarchy matters, but expertise, alternatives, networks, and control of information also shape dependence.
For practical communication within unequal workplace relationships, see Assertiveness at Work: How to Speak Up, Set Limits, and Handle Conflict.
Education
A teacher has legitimate authority within the classroom, reward power through grades or opportunities, expert power in the subject, and sometimes referent power if students identify with or admire the teacher. These sources can reinforce one another, but they are psychologically distinct.
Healthcare
Clinicians can possess expert and informational power because patients need specialized knowledge. Institutional roles can add legitimate authority over procedures, while patients retain important forms of power through consent, information about their own experience, and the ability to accept or refuse many interventions. The relationship is therefore asymmetric in some domains and reciprocal in others.
Friendships and Close Relationships
Formal authority may be absent, yet power differences can emerge through emotional dependence, social networks, financial resources, access to housing, control of shared decisions, or unequal alternatives. Relational power is especially difficult to understand if all disagreement is labeled “control.” Boundaries, requests, preferences, leverage, and coercion are different phenomena.
For that distinction, see Boundaries vs Control: What Is the Difference in Relationships?.
Online Communities
A moderator may have legitimate and coercive power because they can enforce rules or remove access. A technically knowledgeable member may possess expert power. A highly admired creator may have referent power. A person controlling key information or access to a network may have informational or gatekeeping power even without formal authority.
These examples illustrate a general rule: ask what outcome is controlled, why it matters to the target, and what alternatives exist.
Common Misconceptions About Social Power
“Power means domination.”
Domination is one possible form of power, especially when influence depends on threat or coercion. Social power also arises from expertise, legitimacy, rewards, identification, and information. Treating all power as domination collapses distinct mechanisms into one moralized category.
“Power and status are the same.”
They often correlate, but power concerns control over valued outcomes and status concerns respect and esteem. Modern hierarchy research treats this distinction as fundamental (Magee & Galinsky, 2008; Hays et al., 2026).
“A formal title tells you who has power.”
Titles matter because they can create legitimate power and control over resources. They do not reveal the entire dependence structure. Expertise, alternatives, networks, collective support, information, and practical implementation can shift effective power away from the formal hierarchy.
“The six bases of power are six kinds of people.”
French and Raven described sources of power in a relation, not personality categories. One actor can simultaneously possess several bases, and the mix can change across targets and domains (Raven, 1993).
“Power always corrupts.”
Psychological evidence supports multiple pathways. Power can facilitate self-interested behavior under some goals and conditions, but it can also facilitate prosocial action. A more evidence-based formulation is that power reduces some constraints and can intensify pursuit of active goals (Guinote, 2017).
“Feeling powerful means being powerful.”
Subjective sense of power and objective resource control are related but distinct. A person can feel influential without controlling important outcomes, or hold formal power while feeling constrained (Anderson, John, & Keltner, 2012).
“Power is a personality trait.”
Power is primarily relational and structural. Personality can affect the pursuit, perception, and use of power, but a person does not carry the same amount of power into every relationship. Even subjective sense of power shows substantial relationship specificity (Anderson, John, & Keltner, 2012).
A Practical Framework for Analyzing Social Power
A useful power analysis begins with the relationship rather than with personality labels.
First, identify the valued outcomes. What does each person or group need, want, fear losing, or hope to gain?
Second, identify who controls those outcomes. Control may involve money, access, decisions, information, approval, membership, reputation, scheduling, credentials, enforcement, expertise, or network connections.
Third, identify alternatives. Dependence is lower when the target can obtain the valued outcome elsewhere. Alternatives may include other jobs, other experts, other social networks, appeals, institutional protections, or independent access to information.
Fourth, identify the basis of power. Is the influence grounded in reward, coercion, legitimacy, expertise, identification, information, or a combination?
Fifth, distinguish power from status. Is the person influential because they control outcomes, because others respect them, or both?
Sixth, identify accountability and constraints. Who can review the decision? What norms, laws, policies, reciprocal dependencies, or collective mechanisms limit unilateral action?
Seventh, identify how power is experienced. Does the actor feel powerful? Does the target perceive the actor as powerful? Structural and subjective power can diverge.
This framework avoids a common mistake: explaining a power relation entirely through character judgments. Many power differences exist because of resource distribution, institutional roles, social dependence, and alternatives rather than because one person is naturally “dominant.”
Social Power and Ethical Evaluation
Psychology can describe how power operates without deciding that every use of power is legitimate.
A physician’s expert recommendation, a teacher’s grading authority, a parent’s responsibility for a young child, an employer’s control of assignments, a platform moderator’s rule enforcement, and an abuser’s coercive threat can all involve power. Their ethical and legal status differs radically.
The source of power is therefore separate from the moral evaluation of its use. Legitimate power can be exercised unfairly. Informational power can be used honestly or deceptively. Reward power can support cooperation or become manipulation. Coercive power can enforce necessary safety rules or become abusive.
This distinction is especially important in psychology because descriptive concepts are easily turned into moral labels. “Power” tells us something about capacity, dependence, and influence. It does not by itself tell us whether an action is justified.
Social Power and Leadership
Leadership involves coordinating, directing, representing, or mobilizing people toward collective activity. Power can support leadership, but leadership and power are not synonyms.
A leader may rely on legitimate authority, expertise, referent influence, rewards, information, or coercion. Informal leaders can emerge without formal authority. Conversely, a person can hold power over resources without effectively leading anyone.
Research on dominance, prestige, and leadership motives also shows that the desire to influence others is psychologically heterogeneous. Leadership motivation can involve taking responsibility for a group, whereas dominance motivation emphasizes imposing one’s will and prestige motivation emphasizes admiration and respect (Suessenbach et al., 2019).
The social-power construct therefore helps explain one component of leadership: the capacity and bases through which a leader can influence others. It does not replace the broader psychology of leadership.
Social Power and Conformity, Compliance, Obedience, and Reactance
These terms describe responses or processes, not synonyms for power.
Compliance means changing behavior in response to a request or demand. Obedience usually refers more specifically to responding to an authority command. Conformity involves alignment with group norms or behavior. Reactance refers to motivational resistance that can arise when freedom is perceived as threatened.
Power can contribute to all of these processes, but none is identical to power. A person may possess coercive power and provoke reactance instead of compliance. A legitimate authority can elicit obedience. A high-status peer group can produce conformity without a single actor controlling resources.
French and Raven’s original framework was explicitly interested in why different bases of power produce different kinds of change, dependence, resistance, and durability (French & Raven, 1959). That historical distinction remains useful: the existence of power does not predetermine the target’s response.
Social Power in Groups and Institutions
Interpersonal definitions are useful, but many real power relations are embedded in organizations and institutions.
A manager’s authority exists because an organization recognizes a role. A professional’s expert power depends partly on credentialing systems. A platform moderator’s coercive capacity depends on technical permissions. A committee can distribute or constrain decision rights. A group can collectively resist an individual’s power by coordinating alternatives or sanctions.
This means social power often operates through layers. The immediate actor may be only one node in a broader system of rules, resources, norms, technologies, and institutional backing.
The contemporary debate over definitions of power becomes especially important at this level. Resource-control models remain useful for identifying dependence, but broader approaches argue that institutions and cultures can shape what counts as a resource, who is recognized as legitimate, and which forms of influence become visible or invisible (Bettache, Travaglino, & Beattie, 2026).
What Modern Psychology Can Say With Confidence
Several conclusions are well supported enough to serve as a stable map of the field.
• Social power is relational. Its strength depends on who can affect whose valued outcomes and under what conditions.
• Power is not identical to influence. Power is capacity; influence is realized change.
• Power is not identical to status. Resource control and respect are distinct bases of hierarchy even when they correlate.
• Dependence and alternatives are central. Power increases when one party depends on outcomes controlled by another and has fewer alternatives.
• Power has multiple bases. The French–Raven tradition remains a useful taxonomy of sources of influence, although the model has been elaborated substantially since 1959.
• Power can alter psychology. Research supports links with approach orientation, action, attention to rewards, goal pursuit, social distance, and changes in social judgment, but these effects are probabilistic and moderated.
• Power is context-sensitive. Goals, accountability, legitimacy, culture, status, role expectations, and measurement method can change observed effects.
• Power is not inherently one moral behavior. It can facilitate harmful or prosocial action depending on goals, norms, constraints, and opportunities.
What Remains Debated
The field continues to debate how broad the definition of power should be, how well laboratory manipulations represent durable real-world power, which classic effects generalize across contexts, and how culture changes the experience of hierarchy.
The growing separation of power from status is one major development. Another is the move away from one-directional claims such as “power makes people X” toward models that specify mechanisms and moderators. A third is renewed attention to collective, institutional, cultural, and ideological forms of power that may not fit neatly inside dyadic resource-control definitions.
The result is a more precise science, even if it is less slogan-friendly.
FAQ
What is the simplest definition of social power?
Social power is the capacity to influence another person or group because the actor controls, represents, or provides something that affects valued outcomes. In modern psychology it is usually treated as relational and context-dependent rather than as a fixed personality trait.
What are the six types of social power?
The familiar French–Raven tradition includes reward, coercive, legitimate, expert, referent, and informational power. The original 1959 chapter identified five bases; informational power was added in Raven’s later development of the model (French & Raven, 1959; Raven, 1993).
What is the difference between social power and social influence?
Power is the capacity or potential to produce change. Influence is the change that actually occurs. A person can possess power without exercising it, and influence can sometimes occur without a stable power asymmetry.
What is the difference between power and status?
Power is based primarily on control over valued resources and outcomes; status is based on respect and esteem. A person can be high in one and low in the other (Magee & Galinsky, 2008).
What is the difference between power and authority?
Authority is a legitimate right to direct or decide within a recognized role or system. Power is broader and can also arise from coercion, rewards, expertise, information, identification, or dependence.
Is dominance the same as power?
No. Dominance is one route to social rank that relies on force, intimidation, or threat. Social power can arise through many other routes, including expertise, legitimate authority, rewards, information, and referent influence (Cheng et al., 2013).
Does power always make people less empathetic?
Research suggests that power can reduce attention to others in some contexts, partly because higher-power people are less dependent on them. But goals, accountability, roles, and culture moderate these effects. Power does not mechanically eliminate empathy or perspective taking (Guinote, 2017).
Does power always corrupt?
No universal psychological law supports that claim. Power can reduce constraints and strengthen action toward active goals. If those goals are selfish or exploitative, power can enable harmful behavior; if they are prosocial or responsibility-focused, power can enable those behaviors as well (Guinote, 2017).
How is social power measured?
Researchers measure structural control over resources, formal roles, subjective sense of power, French–Raven power bases, observed influence, and naturalistic rank. These measures capture related but different aspects of power, so results should be interpreted according to the specific operationalization.
Can a person have power without authority?
Yes. Expertise, money, information, social networks, gatekeeping, coercive leverage, or control over opportunities can create power even when the person has no legitimate right to command others.
Can a person have status without power?
Yes. A respected scholar, artist, elder, or expert may receive high esteem while controlling few resources or formal decisions. Status can also become a source of influence, but it is conceptually distinct from power.
Related Articles
References
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