Blog #5: POWER

"The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." –Stanley Milgram, 1974

I read with utmost interest Iris Marion Young’s article “the many faces of oppression.” According to her, oppression comes in five different shades: violence, exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, and cultural imperialism. Powerlessness stands out the most to me because it is lack of power - the inability to demand better and equal treatment - that makes people continue to live in oppression.

The chapter on power is the most interesting topic on Experience Sociology yet. It defines power as the ability to bring about an intended outcome, even when opposed by others. Power has two sides to it: the power to do something (positive) for oneself or others and the power over someone or something. The ‘power over’ approach focuses on individual enhancement and achievement while the ‘power to’ approach focuses on overcoming opposition and dominating others. It is the latter form of power management that is responsible for oppression and other social ills.

There are three important uses of power that directly affect our lives: economic power affects resource allocation; political power affects how and what rules and decisions are enacted; finally there is cultural power which defines the reality we live in. this last use of power interests me very much. Dominant culture, social institutions and the media we consume define social reality in a particular way. People in positions of power have the capacity to manufacture the reality they want the masses to believe.

For power to work it has to be met with compliance (or disobedience). In trying to understand how Germans would let and why some ordinary citizens participated in the holocaust, Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist, conducted a series of social psychology experiments where teachers were asked to administer electrical shocks of varying degrees to students who did not give proper answers. I found the prompts from the professor inside the room with the teachers very interesting. He just told the participants they needed to continue with the experiment, clarified any questions the teachers had and reassured them that the student will not die from the voltage. This is a good example of the trust we bestow on people who wield expert and informational power.  This is not to say compliance is a bad thing, we all need to comply with a lot of laws, rules and regulations set by the social institutions we interact with to ensure the smooth running of society. But when power has negative results, to change the circumstances we live in, it is essential that we revolt.