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Course Syllabus (Fa13) Coli 211 Literature & Psychology: "Power, The Subject, And Technological Rationality", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Description and Objectives:

In this course, we will examine mechanisms of power and the processes by which these produce categories of subjectivity. Theoretically speaking, we will begin by considering these processes at the level of society and then dwell on their human experience at the level of the psyche. Here, we will aim to discover processes by which the subject reproduces conditions of domination by power at the level of psychic experience. Power-practices assume their condition of possibility by positing, on the one hand, that the category of the subject is a priori existent and, on the other, that …

A Pilot Test On The Role Of Power In Mate Choice, Addison Zhao

Honors Scholar Theses

To test two competing theories, social role and sexual strategies, a study was proposed to have participants evaluate dating profiles that varied in agency, communion, and status. Power was also manipulated to test for effects on likelihood to date an individual. To test methods used for the proposed study, a pilot study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of a power prime task, a manipulation check for the power prime task, the attractiveness of 24 pictures, and an analysis of 12 profiles. The study found that power priming with analogies did not significantly lead to participants feeling powerful. This finding …

New Insights Into Corruption: Paradoxical Effects Of Approach-Orientation For Powerholders, Mindi Sara Rock

Open Access Dissertations

Does power lead to corruption (Kipnis, 1972), and if so, why? Here, a novel mechanism is proposed for understanding the complex relationship between power and corruption by incorporating recent work on morality (Janoff-Bulman, Sheikh, & Hepp, 2009). By bridging the power, self-regulation, and morality literatures we proposed that powerful individuals, because of their approach tendencies, are oriented more towards moral prescriptions or “shoulds” and thus focus more on moral acts and moral intentions while minimizing the importance of moral proscriptions (neglect pathway). We proposed an alternative path to corruption for powerholders via moral self-regard. Powerholders, because of their …

Protected Species: Perspectives On Organisational Life, Maryam Omari, Megan Paull, Julie A. Crews

Research outputs 2013

Analogies can be drawn between a modern organisation and a complex ecosystem. In both, the players compete for scarce resources; survival often depends on how effectively an individual, organism or group capitalises on what is available to them. In natural settings, the laws of nature provide a backdrop to relationships, including where each individual or group is positioned in the hierarchy. In such settings, unusual and complex interrelationships can be formed where groups either assist or manipulate each other to survive. In organisational settings, the laws and boundaries are less clear, context specific and subject to organisational cultures and norms, …

Maybe It’S Right, Maybe It’S Wrong: Structural And Social Determinants Of Deception In Negotiation, Mara Olekalns

Mara Olekalns

Context shapes negotiators’ actions, including their willingness to act unethically. Focusing on negotiators use of deception, we used a simulated two-party negotiation to test how three contextual variables - regulatory focus, power, and trustworthiness - interacted to shift negotiators’ ethical thresholds. We demonstrated that these three variables interact to either inhibit or activate deception, providing support for an interactionist model of ethical decision-making. Three patterns emerged from our analyses. First, low power inhibited and high power activated deception. Second, promotion-focused negotiators favored sins of omission whereas prevention-focused negotiators favored sins of commission. Third, low cognition-based trust influenced deception when negotiators …