Power Sticks & Power Carrots
Absolute Power Carrots Corrupt Absolutely
Summary. In Part I, I introduced the Iron Rule of Power, the idea that is difficult to discern who has power in any given setting. The reason is that power resides in beliefs, which are not visible, distributed, and often hard to infer. Here in Part II, I discuss the source of people’s beliefs about who wields power. An obvious source is beliefs about individuals’ or groups’ capacity to harm, imposing costs. The second source is the capacity to confer benefits. In both cases, the crux of the issue is contingencies. If a person believes that someone will impose a cost/confer a benefit if they take action X instead of Y, then they will take the action to maximize their interests. Setting up these contingencies induces others to make choices that are good for the individual with power.
Power Part II: Power Sticks and Power Carrots
In Part I of this series, I defined power as an organism’s ability to advance their interests through the use of coercive force, threats of the use of force, and the promise of reward. I proposed the Iron Rule of Power, which says that power is complicated and, as a consequence, it’s often difficult to discern who has power in any given setting. I argued, drawing on both fact and fiction, that at its core, power exists because of what people believe. In this part, I look in more detail at where those all-important beliefs come from.
Just as it is for non-human animals, the capacity for violence—harm—is, for humans, a key source of power. Big bullies can take lunch money from their smaller classmates, police armed with guns can control large crowds, and armies can subdue neighbors through conquest. Importantly, also just like non-human animals, much of the time violence need not actually be used for the individual with power to be able to get what they want. It is sufficient to make the threat of harm to induce others to comply. Your average mugger would prefer you hand over your wallet without anyone getting hurt, thank you very much.
Now, it’s important to bear in mind that for threats to work, the people being threatened have to know about, believe, and understand the threat. Threats must be credible. One of my favorite examples of this is from Dr. Strangelove (SPOILERS), in which the Russians have invented a machine that will automatically retaliate with nuclear Armageddon in the event of an attack on them. We learn about this while planes, which cannot be recalled, are on their way to bomb Moscow, and when the planes deliver their payloads, the attack will set off the device. Here is the dialog between Dr. Strangelove and the Russian Ambassador at the critical moment when the Americans learn about the machine:
Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?
Ambassador de Sadesky: It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.
Dr. Strangelove is, of course, right. Threats only work when the other parties know about them.
What Friends Are For
For humans, unlike most of our animal cousins, the fight goes not always to the strong, but rather to the best supported. Human conflicts are frequently—though, of course, not always—decided by who has the most people on their side. This is true from low stakes issues such as who decides on the weekend plans to the fields of mass warfare.1
Humans use friends to advance their interests, but we typically don’t like to put it these terms because it feels as if it cheapens relationships.2 Nonetheless, friends and allies are useful for advancing one’s own interests and that is likely why we make friends in the first place. Humans’ friendship and alliance networks3 play central roles in how much power they have.
The power of friends and allies is, once again, absolutely to do with beliefs. Consider cases in which there is one individual who—everyone knows—everyone else will support when conflicts arise. This situation is more or less what we see in many non-human hierarchies: there is one dominant individual. But in human hierarchies, this can occur as well and the result is predictable: dictatorship. Because support from everyone else leads to unmatched formidability, dictators can more or less do as they please and, historically, this is exactly what they have done.4
In sum, people have various ways of hurting other people—direct violence, ganging up with their friends, etc.—and this potential is a key source of power. I’ll summarize all the ways someone can hurt others as power sticks. Because you use sticks to hit people with. And this is about power. See?
Power Carrots
For most organisms, conferring benefits on others is hard. If you’re a salmon, it’s hard to help out another salmon. What are you going to do? There just aren’t a lot of options.
Humans, however, because we are quite clever, make tools, and accumulate knowledge—and have constructed market economies—can deliver benefits to others as easily as dropping a quarter in violin case. Therefore, unlike many of our relatives on the tree of life, we have a second source of power: altruism. Humans are so good at altruism that some have referred to us as SuperCooperators.
Just as in the case of threats, we can use our capacity to benefit others to set up contingencies: IF you do this THEN I’ll do that. So, if, say, you play Nocturne, then I will put $5 in your violin case.
People use all kinds of contingencies to induce others to do something that advances their interests. The entire employment market is like this: if you do this work (which you would otherwise not do), then I’ll give you this money (which I would otherwise not give you). Should this capacity count as an aspect of power? Power, recall, is an organism’s ability to advance interests through contingencies. So it seems to fit the bill.
My claim here is not that humans are unique in this respect. Exchanges of, for example, resources for sex have been documented in species ranging from insects to chimpanzees. Humans have simply taken this to another level, exchanging a tremendous array of goods and services—often, but not always, using money as a medium of exchange.
People’s “power carrots”—goods or services that a person can offer in exchange for something they want—are as diverse as the array of benefits someone can confer on others. Having a great deal of money is perhaps the most obvious, and is no doubt behind the expression, “money is power.” It is. But anything that one has or controls that others want can similarly be used to induce others to change their behavior. People who have the ability to confer status—through granting titles, degrees, honorifics, and, these days, by adding mentions in social media posts—can use this power to get goods and services that they want. (The non-profit I work for was recently confronted with the power of social media influencers, who extract free event tickets in exchange for posting their excitement about an upcoming fundraising event.) Similarly, attractive individuals can use the prospect of sexual access to change others’ behavior and advance their interests. The list of sources of power—benefits to be conferred—is as long as the list of all the different things people want. And the more valuable the benefit one can confer, the more power one wields.
The Power of Contingency
Taking stock to this point, we have three rules about power. The first is that it’s hard to figure out who has it. The second is that power derives from the ability to impose costs/harm: Power Sticks. The third is that power derives as well from the ability to confer benefits: Power Carrots.
Along the way, we have seen some additional features of power. First, people’s beliefs about others’ ability harm/benefit can be crucial— more important, in some cases, than the reality. These beliefs are especially important when it comes to the threat of harm or the promise of reward: people’s choices will depend on their beliefs about whether the threats and promises are credible. We also saw that one form of power is to do with one’s allies because humans cooperate and coordinate in multi-individual coalitions.
In some ways, all of this makes it seem as if understanding power isn’t all that complicated. We have a small number of rules and some rough and ready ways to examine power dynamics. Unfortunately, it’s all very complicated. These two posts set the table for the ones to come. In the next post, we visit an incident on a ski slope, Les Misérables, and Thurgood Marshall to start to get a handle on some of the complexities of power.
References
de Waal, F. B. M. (1982). Chimpanzee politics: Power and sex among apes. Johns Hopkins University Press.
DeScioli, P., & Kurzban, R. (2009). The alliance hypothesis for human friendship. PLoS ONE, 4(5), e5802. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0005802
Fiske, A. P. (1992). The four elementary forms of sociality: Framework for a unified theory of social relations. Psychological Review, 99(4), 689-723.
King, S. L., Allen, S. J., Krützen, M., & Connor, R. C. (2019). Vocal behaviour of allied male dolphins during cooperative mate guarding. Animal Cognition, 22(6), 991-1000.
Moore, B. L., Connor, R. C., Allen, S. J., Krützen, M., & King, S. L. (2020). Acoustic coordination by allied male dolphins in a cooperative context. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 287(1924), 20192944.
Phillips, S., & Cooney, M. (2005). Aiding peace, abetting violence: Third parties and the management of conflict. American Sociological Review, 70(2), 334-357.
Rodman, P. S. (1981). Inclusive fitness and group size with a reconsideration of group sizes in lions and wolves. The American Naturalist, 118(2), 275-283. https://doi.org/10.1086/283826
Snyder, G. H. (1997). Alliance politics. Cornell University Press.
Thornhill, R. (1976). Sexual selection and paternal investment in insects. The American Naturalist, 110(971), 153-163.
We use the planning example in DeScioli & Kurzban, 2009. Warfare is, of course, complicated. By and large, historically, larger forces win, though of course there are any number of exceptions, especially where there are significant asymmetries in the skill of the commander, technology, terrain, command/control, morale, and so forth.
See Alan Fiske’s corpus of work on this for an insightful analysis.
My view is that friends just are allies (DeScioli & Kurzban, 2009), so I’ll use these terms somewhat interchangeably for this discussion.
Historical examples no doubt come easily to the reader’s mind, and it’s obviously more complicated. In subsequent entries in this series, we visit the question of the constraints on power, especially dictators. See Snyder (1997) for a discussion. This idea is what Snyder calls bandwagoning.