Building on recent psychological research showing that power increases self-focused attention, we propose that having power increases accuracy in perception of bodily signals, a phenomenon known as interoceptive accuracy. Consistent with our proposition, participants in a high-power experimental condition outperformed those in the control and low-power conditions in the Schandry heartbeat-detection task. We demonstrate that the effect of power on interoceptive accuracy is not explained by participants’ physiological arousal, affective state, or general intention for accuracy. Rather, consistent with our reasoning that experiencing power shifts attentional resources inward, we show that the effect of power on interoceptive accuracy is dependent on individuals’ chronic tendency to focus on their internal sensations. Moreover, we demonstrate that individuals’ chronic sense of power also predicts interoceptive accuracy similar to, and independent of, how their situationally induced feeling of power does. We therefore provide further support on the relation between power and enhanced perception of bodily signals. Our findings offer a novel perspective–a psychophysiological account–on how power might affect judgments and behavior. We highlight and discuss some of these intriguing possibilities for future research.

In the present research we elaborate on an ecological account (Fiedler, Jung, Wänke & Alexopoulos, 2012) for the unitary distance dimension postulated in construal-level theory, highlighting linguistic influences on distance regulation. We first replicate that distinct action verbs solicit similarly distant or close episodes in many judges, producing strong positive correlations between ratings of four distance aspects (time, space, probability, personal distance). A primary semantic-pragmatic dimension that accounts for a large part of the verb impact is valence: Negative action verbs trigger more distant episodes than positive verbs. Experiment 1 rules out an alternative explanation in terms of participants' mood. Experiment 2 cross-validates the valence effect with a new sample of affective state verbs. Consistent with implicit verb causality, state verbs solicit more distant episodes than action verbs, suggesting lack of intentional control and power as another semantic-pragmatic dimension. Experiment 3 supports this interpretation using high-and low-power nouns.

One of the most accepted findings across psychology is that people are unrealistically optimistic in their judgments of comparative risk concerning future life events—they judge negative events as less likely to happen to themselves than to the average person. Harris and Hahn (2011), however, demonstrated how unbiased (non-optimistic) responses can result in data patterns commonly interpreted as indicative of optimism due to statistical artifacts. In the current paper, we report the results of 5 studies that control for these statistical confounds and observe no evidence for residual unrealistic optimism, even observing a ‘severity effect’ whereby severe outcomes were overestimated relative to neutral ones (Studies 3 & 4). We conclude that there is no evidence supporting an optimism interpretation of previous results using the prevalent comparison method.

Previous research suggests that people systematically overestimate the occurrence of both positive and negative events, compared with neutral future events, and that these biases are due to a misattribution of arousal elicited by utility (stake-likelihood hypothesis; SLH; Vosgerau, 2010). However, extant research has provided only indirect support for these arousal misattribution processes. In the present research, we initially aimed to provide a direct test of the SLH by measuring arousal with galvanic skin responses to examine the mediating role of arousal. We observed no evidence that measured arousal mediated the impact of utility on probability estimates. Given the lack of direct support for the SLH in Experiment 1, Experiments 2-5 aimed to assess the SLH by replicating some of the original findings that provided support for arousal misattribution as a mechanism. Despite our best efforts to create experimental conditions under which we would be able to demonstrate the stake-likelihood effect, we were unable to replicate previous results, with a Bayesian meta-analysis demonstrating support for the null hypothesis. We propose that accounts based on imaginability and loss function asymmetry are currently better candidate explanations for the influence of outcome utility on probability estimates.

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