Behavioral Foundations of Power and Control

Project Information

CONTROL

Grant agreement ID: 803332

DOI

10.3030/803332

Project closed

EC signature date 13 December 2018

Start date 1 March 2019

End date 31 August 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 492 785,00

EU contribution

€ 1 492 785,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITE DE FRIBOURG
Switzerland

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - CONTROL (Behavioral Foundations of Power and Control)

Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2024-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Power relations are an integral part of economic organizations, as well as political and social institutions. People exercise power over others – or are exposed to the power of others – in government, in firms, and even in families. Attitudes towards power and autonomy have important economic and societal consequences; examples include such diverse matters as the willingness to delegate power to government, empire building in (public) organizations, or sorting into more or less autonomous jobs. Clearly, people care deeply about power and autonomy in different dimensions of their lives. In recent referenda, a majority of British people voted for leaving the EU and many Catalan people voted to become independent of Spain. In their professional lives, people may prefer to work self-employed or choose jobs that grant them independence and freedom – even though this can sometimes come at the cost of a lower income.

Who are the people who have strong preferences for autonomy and power? How can we measure these preferences? How are these preferences determined, do they differ between cultures, and can they predict the demand for different institutions and organizational structures? Understanding the need for autonomy and power and its implications is at the core of this ERC project.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

- We developed a preference elicitation tool for intrinsic preferences for autonomy and power. We have implemented several large data collections to study the individual determinants of preferences for autonomy and power, as well as their relation to political views, occupational choices, socioeconomic characteristics and psychological traits. A large general population data collection in nine countries was performed to assess cultural differences in preferences for autonomy.

- We find that a majority of individuals display intrinsic preferences for choice autonomy, but a significant minority is also averse to own choice., but there is substantial heterogeneity within the population. The methodology and results on individual heterogeneity are contained in a working paper (Freundt, Herz and Kopp, 2023).

- We find that intrinsic preferences for autonomy are negatively correlated with the degree of individualism at the country level. These results are informative regarding the debate about the relationship between individualism and the need for autonomy, and point to the importance to differentiate between intrinsic and instrumental needs in this respect. They also suggest that choice autonomy may have attributes similar to a consumption good.

- We analyzed whether intrinsic preferences for autonomy are moderated by the identity of the individual that would otherwise take decisions. We find that, in the domain of political identity, this is indeed the case. Individuals are more averse to give up their autonomy if they do not share the political identity of the potential delegate. This finding points to an additional channel that inhibits the formation of efficient institutions if constituents do not share the same identity. The results of this subproject have been published in a working paper (Freundt and Herz, 2024).

- We analyzed the relationship between intrinsic preferences for autonomy, employment choices, and political views. No significant correlations could be identified in the data.

- With respect to intrinsic preferences for power, we similarly find that individuals display intrinsic preferences for power, but a significant minority is averse to exercising power. Interestingly, we find that the intrinsic desire for power is negatively correlated with preferences for equality. In addition, we find strong correlations between intrinsic preferences for power and autocractic tendencies. Our results thus point to interesting correlations between intrinsic preferences for power and underlying personality traits.

The final part of the overall project was concerned with reactions to being subjected to power and control. In a first subproject, we studied control aversion in hierarchies, and we found that negative reactions to being controlled were less pronounced when control was exercised higher up in an organizational hierarchy. The results of this subproject are written up in a working paper (de Chiara, Engl, Herz and Manna, 2022).

We also studied whether motivation to perform in a subordinate position is moderated by the perceived legitimacy of the controlling party. The novelty of our experimental design is that it fully controls for all pecuniary incentives that often covary with legitimacy, meaning that we exogenously vary determinants of perceived legitimacy, keeping pecuniary incentives constant. We find that perceived legitimacy is indeed associated with subordinate motivation, and thus show that the perceived legitimacy of decision hierarchies is an independent determinant of worker motivation. The results of this subproject are written up in a working paper (Herz and Zihlmann, 2024).

The final subproject combined the three central tenets of this grant, measurement of intrinsic preferences for autonomy, measurement of intrinsic preferences for power, and measurement of reactions to control, in one behavioral experiment to explore the relation between these constructs. As this was the last subproject to be implemented, we are still in the process of analyzing the relationships.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

1. We delivered a novel preference elicitation tool for intrinsic preferences for autonomy and power, increasing the toolkit of social scientists for measure the preferences underlying human behavior.

2. We identified significant correlates of such preferences at the individual level. These results point to a so far underexplored preference dimension, and help to better understand differences in individual behavior. In particular in the domain of intrinsic preferences for power, the relation to psychological traits and to social preferences are strong and inform the question of who seeks power for intrinsic reasons.

3. We identified a correlation between intrinsic preferences for autonomy and individualism in a cross-country design, which informs the debate around the relationship between individualism and the need for autonomy, and points to the importance to differentiate between intrinsic and instrumental needs in this respect.

3. Our results on the moderating impact of shared identity on intrinsic preferences for autonomy have important implications for the formation and continuation of joint institutions. In particular, our data shows that shared identity facilitates the formation of shared institutions, respectively divergent identity poses an additional hurdle that inhibits the formation of shared institutions. These results help to better understand referenda results on institution formation, such as the Brexit vote in 2016, but also inform the effectiveness and consequences of identity politics more generally.

4. Finally, our results on the reactions to control and authority have novel implications for the optimal design of hierarchies in organizations.

Illustrating Image for the need of autonomy