The Effects of Power - Part 2 - Dipravation

Social Reality: Violence, Power, and Change
The Effects of Power - Part 2 - Dipravation

"Power has to be demystified" - charlie777pt

Introduction

The effects of Power is such a vast subject, that I had to divide the this matter in five posts, the first one we made a Philosophical Rally, followed by this one about the Deprivation, and in the next ones hte subjects are Submission, Corruption and Resistance.

Before going on this subject it is good to keep in mind the distinction between the concepts of Social Power (authority, status, dominance ) as the control of another person behaviors, and Personal Power (autonomy, independence, and competence ) like the control of our own choices and actions.

Individual happiness and the transformation of social conditions require a revolution with new visions of human equality and solidarity for power decentralization.
Power can be used in positive ways like doing no harm, share information, and for the help and support of those who need it.
At an even higher level, it can be a proactive action to defend, educate and protect people or even give comfort and psychologic nurture.

"True power is to be recognized by the protection it affords." - Ernst Junger

Power is used in a negative way when it allows hurting or harm, hide information and knowledge or denies or refuse help to any calls for emotional help.
It can be worst when it is reactive and there are attacks and violent confrontation, hides knowledge and information with occult motives like blackmail or using lousy propaganda to seduce and generate hate and destruction.

"The real struggle in which we are involved is more and more dearly that between the powers of destruction and the powers of life." - Ernst Junger

Power of governments influence economic wealth and the structure and functioning of any society and as a coercive monopoly using aggression and violence for pseudo-protection to justify the invasion of privacy contributing to enhancing domination and control.

Max De Pree sees Leadership as the art of "freeing people to do what is required of them in the most efficient and humane way possible" and that can be measured in the leader by the potential reached by each person, the motivation and the level of results achieved.
The effects of power variate from the ones who have it and the ones that are constrained by it.
Actual neurosciences studies at the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that exposition to power has destructive effects on the frontal lobes as brain trauma.
Power is not a personal property but a dynamic process generated between a group and a leader, the contingency of the situation and the personal capacities and volition of the group.

Dahl, in 1975, showed that the Effects of Power are dependent on the group's servitude, and it can be measured by the degree of behavioral changes it causes.
Pruit in 1976 demonstrated that the way as Power is perceived in a central person and not the real character, and measured this effect in the function of the type of sanctions that the leader was invested.
He recognized that the element of Power is very difficult to isolate and simulate in all its dimensions as well as all the possible consequences.
The famous studies of Zimbardo and Haney in 1977 tried to understand the Effects of Power in an experiment where a group of students was divided into two roles in a prison, the guards, and the prisoners.
The experiment was interrupted because the guards were using and abusing power in an extreme level over the prisoners.

1- What is the Deprivation of Power?

Now, let's talk briefly about some of the Effects of the Deprivation of Power on people.
The Powerless always suffer from control deprivation, which causes anxiety and a sensed threat to the self-esteem, self-image, and self-concept affecting their psychological stability.
Seligman in 1975 put people in conditions that they couldn't control a situation, which generated a sense of incapacity to act that he called "assimilated impotence".

Abramson, Seligman, and Teasdale in 1978 discovered that when people can't influence the surrounding reality, they feel impotent by Power Deprivation because they lose control over life by the incapacity to exercise it.
Rotter in 1966 demonstrated that some individuals can create attitudes to try to dominate the situation that in the beginning seemed uncontrollable, but in parallel, they also created that reinforced the felt impotence.
Rotter called that internal and external control, the first connected to the feeling our decisions have some impact on reality and the second when we feel we can't control the situation or events around us.

Deprivation of Power is felt when there is a total lack of control that can be only inside our minds when we think the events and the circumstances totally eliminate our influence.
Touraine in 1982 defined this impotence of uncontrollable capacity to use our power like a kind of alienation as a lack of consciousness.
It seems that Power Deprivation is correlated to the same phenomena in the conscious of our own power to influence reality.
This shows that any social structure economic, political and social systems create a duality of a power gap of rich and the poor, men and women, parents and sons, employed and jobless, etc., defining a domination excluding the ones that are in the bottom of the pyramid.
Power defines a scale distribution of people affected by the distribution of power, defining the degree of total use to complete Deprivation.

2- Women and Deprivation of Power

There was a lot of studies in this area found out that in most cases women are normally deprived of Power, and we are going to summarize some of the conclusions of this investigations.
First, we will understand that women with the responsibility of domestic tasks have more difficulties in conciliating home and job responsibilities and that they have to deal with the social representations and stereotypes that do not except their right to exercise the role of a leader.
In this studies, masculine leaders are seen by women and men, as better capacitated and competent than the feminine leaders, and that women associate to men because they feel less habilitated to perform leadership.
This show that women are pre-conditioned to feel inferior to men.

Other studies proved that when a successful leadership by women works, it considered that it is more based on luck than capacities., while in the case of being a masculine leadership success is attributed to competence.
So society tends to devalue women based in sexual gender stereotypes that tend to show the women inferiority, except in the case of health professionals where women are seen as more capable in some tasks due to their bigger tolerance in interrelationships with other people.
Investigations in women managers in enterprises showed that women have to stick to masculine values because organizations see men as more fit then women and the dominating model is the male values.
They found out that women managers are identified with masculine values and they are more submitted to"initiation rituals" because they have to continuously prove their competences to be accepted.

When power is attributed to women, men feel their rights usurped.
This superlative evaluation of men is contradictory with the cases I've already mentioned two posts ago about the gender differences in Men vs Women, because after a proper training for a task, men and women perform the same behaviors and that before or in the absence of training, men and women perform stereotypical gendered behaviors.
But it is congruent with the view that women show less confidence and low satisfaction with their performance than men, even though they didn’t differ in the accomplishment.
In the next post, I will speak about Power Submission, Corruption and Resistance.
Video

Last posts in this series on Social Reality: Violence, Power and Change
Introduction:

Social Reality: Violence, Power and Change

A - Violence:

An Introduction to Violence
The Concepts of Violence, Aggression, and Aggressiveness
The Theories on Violence
The influencers of Violence -Part One - Culture and Social Context
The influencers of Violence -Part Two - Social , Cognitive and Environmental Factors
The ascend of Today's Violence

B -Power:

What is Power? - Introduction
The Nature of Power

• Part I - The Notions of Power
• Part II -The Dimensions of Power
• Part III -The Foundations of Power

The Dynamics of Power:

• Part 1 - The Legitimacy of Authority
• Part 2 - The Models of Leadership
• Part 3 - Characteristics of Leadership
• Part 4 - The Relation in Leadership
• Part 5 - Decision-making and Leadership

The Effects and Consequences of Power

• Part 1- Philosophical Rally on the Matrix of Power
• Part 2 - Deprivation - this post

Articles from the next series of posts about Social Reality, Violence, Power and Change:

• Part 3- Submission
• Part 4- Corruption
• Part 5- Resistance

C - Change:

Change and Culture The Theories and conceptualization of Change Factors determining Change The ways of Change Social Change

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Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
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