Observations of Dyadic Power in Interpersonal Interaction

Abstract

Power and dominance are widely recognized as fundamental concepts in the study of human relationships. A theory of power, Dunbar's dyadic power theory (DPT), was tested experimentally by manipulating power in interactions with confederate strangers. Participants' verbal and nonverbal dominance behaviors were coded from videotapes of their interactions. DPT proposes that individuals will display more dominance in equal power relationships than in unequal relationships and increasing an individual's relative power will increase that individual's satisfaction with the encounter. The results revealed that the equal-power and unequal high-power conditions displayed more dominance and were more satisfied than those in the unequal low-power conditions but those in the unequal-high power condition were the least affected by their partners and maintained the most control over the partnership's decisions. Implications for DPT and the relationship between microlevel dominance behaviors and the macrolevel impressions of dominant interactants are discussed.

Keywords:

• Observations
• Dyadic Power
• Interpersonal Interaction
• Interpersonal Dominance
• Nonverbal Communication

Acknowledgements

A previous version of this paper was presented to the International Communication Association annual meeting, Montreal, Canada, 2008. The authors would like to thank their student research assistants at California State University Long Beach, especially Vanessa Navarro and Jonathan Nord, for their help with this project. The authors would like to thank Drs. Amy Bippus and Michael R. Kotowski for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. This project was funded by a Scholarly and Creative Activities Mini-Grant from California State University Long Beach.

Notes

1. Subject's rank became this Confederate rank (all the rest remained the same): 1 … 3; 4 … 1; 3 … 9; 5 … 7; 7 … 4; 9 … 12; 12 … 5.

2. Intraclass correlations (ICC) are used to establish a correlation between pairs of observations that do not have an obvious order. The ICC is the correlation between one measurement (either a single rating or a mean of several ratings) on a target and another measurement obtained on that target (Shrout & Fleiss, 1979). Shrout and Fleiss discuss six different versions of the ICC and most can be calculated using the reliability analysis function in SPSS. We used the one-way random version of the ICC with a 95 percent confidence interval and a test value of 0.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Norah E. Dunbar

Norah E. Dunbar is at the Department of Communication and the Center for Applied Social Research, University of Oklahoma

Gordon Abra

Gordon Abra is at the Department of Sociology, University of Oklahoma