Felicia Pratto, University of Connecticut

Date: 

Friday, September 30, 2016, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

CGIS S050

Power, Status, Inequality, and Justice: Experiments in Power Dynamics

Substantial social inequality not only means greater deprivation for the least powerful, but also poorer health for entire societies, and often, mistrust. To address social inequality we must be concerned with what conditions enable those with more to get more, and which facilitate those with little getting more. These are questions of power dynamics. I introduce Power Basis Theory, which promotes an ecological understanding of power as empowerment, to consider how contexts can afford need-fulfillment or curtail it. To examine how having greater power can facilitate gaining power, and how people with little power might do the same, I introduce a multi-player experimental game in which the development or reduction of inequality, simulated violence, fealty, symmetric obligations, sharing resources, simulated survival can be measured, as well as senses of injustice and subjective well-being, can be measured. Various experiments test how agentic versus communal norms and different social constraints influence how much inequality develops or is curtailed, what social factors predict subjective-well-being, and how position influences beliefs about what is just.