How to think about power?

June 3, 2024 12:06 PM

When you think about two sides of a conflict, how do you personally assess which side has the most power? This question is open to any kind of conflict - between 2 adults on the street, between 2 kids, between 2 employees at a business, between 2 communities or demographics, between 2 countries, between a group of people and a government, etc etc etc. I'm looking for ways to compare and measure power. Also looking for helpful ways to think about situations where people feel powerless even when they have many powerful traits and outcomes. Examples inside!

Some examples of what I mean:

Between two people face-to-face:
The larger / stronger / more agitated person often has more power to intimidate or injure the other side. And men often have more physical strength to overpower women.
But once the law gets involved, structural power hierarchies can drastically shift the outcome so that the whitest / richest / least mentally ill person ends up with more power. For instance, if the police intervene in a conflict between a white woman and a Black man, or a wealthy white person and a poor white person, or a mentally-healthy woman and a visibly mentally-ill man, statistics show that Black people, poorer people, and visibly mentally ill people are all treated much more harshly by law enforcement and the criminal justice system.

Between kids:
I observe that schoolyard social power can be affected by:
Wealth (who has enviable clothes, toys, parties, etc)
Charisma (who's good at reading social cues, nice to play with, and funny)
Talent (athletic kids usually have a lot of friends)
Looks (good looking kids often have more friends)
Fear (who's mean or sharp-tongued, so others are scared to cross them)
Conformity (kids who are "unusual", even in positive ways, may be shunned)
By association (getting into a powerful clique, or having a cool older sibling).
But I can think of a lot of exceptions where these factors strangely don't hold true with the kids I know.

In the workplace:
Men are paid more, likelier to be given leadership roles, and tend to speak more in meetings - all ways you might measure power.
Still, many men feel that women have more power because HR policies my prioritize hiring, promoting, or protecting women in the workplace, and because people may believe women who accuse men of sexual assault.

Between two communities:
The wealthier demographic often has more power, but this may not always be true.
For instance, among the wealthiest Asian Americans and Jewish Americans, many feel they have less societal power than white Americans or Christian Americans - due to racism, anti-Semitism, and whiteness and Christian traditions being centered, upifted, and normalized.

Between two countries:
You could ask which country has a stronger military, or which side has killed more people on the other side.
But many of the strongest military powers in the world say they're in constant fear of attack, even though the countries attacking them have way less firepower.

What am I missing? Can you think of more ways to compare power, or helpful ways to discuss the examples above, where people or groups who have many powerful traits and outcomes, still don't feel that they hold power?

posted by nouvelle-personne to Society & Culture (25 answers total)

Might privilege be a better lens than power for this? I'm not sure what, exactly, you're trying to compile here - this is basically the entire field of social justice?
posted by sagc at 12:10 PM on June 3 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I'm trying to find new ways of thinking / discussing these ideas that might resonate with people who feel that social justice ideas are misinterpreting their situation.

The idea of intersectional privilege is groundbreaking and applies in so many situations. But most people feel that they have a lot less privilege than they actually have, so talking about their privilege makes them feel like they're being told their life was easy, or minimizing their struggles and hard work, and it makes them feel defensive, etc.

So I'm looking for other framings that might resonate with people in a new way.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 12:20 PM on June 3 [4 favorites]

Foucault's Power/Knowledge is a foundational study
posted by HearHere at 12:31 PM on June 3 [3 favorites]

Well, one thing that I think that's worth taking into consideration is how visually obvious a person's marginalization is - and what assumptions people might make about a person visually. Obviously this can go both ways - a person can be both discriminated against based on their appearance and more likely to receive care. For example, a wheelchair user will face a degree of ableism, but also if their employer cares about making the workplace equitable, it will be obvious to the employer that they will need to address the needs of that person. Whereas, say, someone who is autistic, especially if they don't have a diagnosis, might have a harder time advocating for themselves or being seen as someone who needs accommodation. Poverty is another major invisible type of marginalization, that also comes with stigma/shame for a lot of people - when I was teaching college students, I noticed that GenZ is generally good about advocating for their own mental health/learning disabilities compared to older generations, but it would often be not until the end of the semester that a student would admit to me they were struggling in part because of financial stress.

Then there is the sort of invisibility within categories, or how categories can elide divisions within them - for example, Asian Americans as a group overall are relatively upwardly mobile, which can hide the fact that Southeast Asian Americans have extremely high incidences of poverty, poor access to healthcare, etc.

Anyway, if you're looking for resources I'd check out the websites of various university teaching centers - while not their only focus, they definitely are on the pulse of research around the best way to communicate/challenge students to think about privilege (their own and that of others).
posted by coffeecat at 12:38 PM on June 3 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Maybe another way to ask this would be,

We all view our own lives, experiences, and possible threats through the lens of our own life story and feelings. A person may go through life feeling powerless or at risk of harm because of experiences they've had or narratives they believe. But that might not actually be objectively true - even a fearful person who thinks they're in danger or doing badly, might actually be pretty safe and doing very well relative to other demographics.

Like my first example - this white woman might feel really scared of this Black man, so she calls the police. She's lacking (or ignoring) systemic insights, like: her fear is overblown due to media narratives and cultural racism, and Black-on-white violent crime is actually very rare, and statistically the police do disproportionate harm to Black men so it's extra-dangerous to involve them, etc. The white woman is statistically much more likely to emerge safe from a street interaction than the Black man is. But even if she's heard those things, she may reject them because her feeling of personal powerlessness is so strong, and that's what will drive her behaviour. So how could you talk to someone about how to accurately compare power, in a way that might reach them?

How can we measure & discuss power in a way that will encourage someone to step outside themselves, look at their situation more systemically, and see how their life experiences align with demographic patterns and statistics?
posted by nouvelle-personne at 12:39 PM on June 3 [3 favorites]

I think you're rediscovering intersectionality from first principles?

From a communication perspective, particularly when interacting with groups that are hostile to wokeness or SJWs or whatever, most of the job is avoiding the specific jargon and phrases that have been made poisonous by bad actors. The general concepts are clear, obvious, and not controversial to most people.
posted by Number Used Once at 12:41 PM on June 3 [6 favorites]

I think of power as something that is distributed through complex systems of relationships. Power Mapping is a tool for organizing campaigns (legislative and other types of community change campaigns) by analyzing who in a community has power and how people are connected.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 12:42 PM on June 3 [1 favorite]

Most (all?) of your examples seem to be based on power deriving from inherent traits, but there are lots of situations where that doesn't matter. Consider business dealings: whoever feels freer to walk away has the greater power in that transaction.

There are lots of transactions where that's just not an issue. If I walk into the corner store and am contemplating buying a pack of gum, neither I nor the clerk really are exercising power in that transaction; I can decide not to buy the gum, and the clerk can decide not to sell it to me, without either one of us really feeling a power imbalance. I can always get the gum somewhere else, and there's always another customer for that pack of gum.
posted by adamrice at 12:42 PM on June 3 [6 favorites]

If I walk into the corner store and am contemplating buying a pack of gum, neither I nor the clerk really are exercising power in that transaction

In some retail contexts (ok, not the one you mentioned but still) there are things like commission and sales quotas that can create really weird power dynamics between sales employees and customers.

In the actual retail context in your example, there are commonly issues of power and discrimination such as which customers receive extra scrutiny or harassment as they contemplate purchasing gum, and which are able to shop in peace and without harassment.

Small shops in particular might allow someone behind the counter to wear clothing that includes strongly political, confrontational, or otherwise selectively aggressive clothing that impacts some shoppers but not others.

A store employee or owner is likely to get a very different response from local law enforcement if you are unhoused and a disagreement arises, if you have an accent that sets you apart from the locals, if you are a minority, if you are well known and influential in the area and the store owner is unliked, and so on.

All of which is to say there are lots of situations where privilege and discrimination aren't issues, until suddenly they are.
posted by Number Used Once at 1:07 PM on June 3 [3 favorites]

I think this Wikipedia article is a pretty good overview.

But in your example in your clarification it kind of sounds more like an empathy gap than a misunderstanding of power structures, maybe even a cognitive empathy gap (the woman is anxious, which short circuits her ability to have empathy.) I’m not sure you’ll get through on the power argument until the anxiety is eased.
posted by warriorqueen at 1:53 PM on June 3 [10 favorites]

Sometimes I talk about it in terms of security and who can "afford" to take risks. What's everyone's safety net; their backup plan. Basically the "invisible backpack" metaphor, I guess, but focusing on practical questions of "what then." If my literal backpack contains a distress beacon, it's less risky for me to venture into the wilderness than someone without that. I might be just as scared as someone else in a storm, and maybe bad things will even happen to me, but there's a plan for that. Or picture a confrontation with someone. If my boss and I are fighting, I'm the one who can lose badly, not them. My backup plan is, what, I quit? Whereas they can fire me, maybe even keep me from getting another job. I might be able to report them to HR or something, but usually those kinds of options are only partially on any given person's side. I don't truly have a champion, and meanwhile my boss probably doesn't even need one but could likely muster up some resources if they really had to.

The hypothetical rich white woman is genuinely anxious for her physical safety, but she's got the police and probably even passersby as her backup plan if bad things start happening. Even if she's literally alone, society is still "with" her, so even if she were hurt, she'd be in a relatively good position to get help and recover. Whereas the hypothetical black man may lack that inherent security, so whatever risks he takes are bigger in that regard. He may have family, it may be his neighborhood, but if he's the one their government would assume guilty, that's a significant consideration. Assuming they're two people who are basically just trying to live their lives without hassling anyone who happen to share a bus stop one night, the white woman may be afraid of him, but he may well be afraid of everyone who's already on her side before sides should even matter.

In the case of kids, in addition to your list, I've seen "whose parent(s)/guardian(s) will do what" impact things significantly. There are parents who are oblivious, ones who focus their efforts solely on their own kid, parents who'll parent other people's kids, parents who'll go find the other kids' parents... it all factors in. Again, what's everyone's backup plan if things start happening? A kid who doesn't understand social stuff intuitively (fewer friends, probably more difficulties with teachers), who isn't the most physically coordinated, whose parent is reluctant to tell off other kids and tries to help by teaching their kid how to placate others... you can say they have less power than other kids, are less privileged due to QRS, but you can also think of them as having less safety than someone the teachers will tend to favor, who have a robust group of friends to help soothe any hurts, who can run away or even fight back, whose parents would put a stop to others' misbehavior while seeing no faults in their own child. It matters less if the second child makes a social mistake or even deliberately does something bad because they're fundamentally going to be fine almost no matter what, whereas a more vulnerable child perhaps can't afford such things.
posted by teremala at 2:05 PM on June 3 [9 favorites]

I was about to link that wikipedia article, I agree it is a good starting point. One book I might recommend in this area if you're looking for different perspectives is "Power, For All" because it's written by two organizational psychologists who try to summarize the psychology research into power structures for a popular audience. It's a bit too "management book" in some of how it's written but it was a good summary of the issues and would work well for someone who is very resistant to social justice language. It helped me better understand my own objections to the popular version of the social justice narrative while also explaining why they're important in the first place.

I'm not an expert but I would say the main difference between intersectionality theory and the psychology models of social power is that intersectionality is inherently based around identity and other long-lasting/universal properties of people and groups. This is very important and is a good way of talking about the larger-scale power structures that Sociology is interested in. However, in practice power is often very situational and different people will have different levels of power depending on their individual relationships to each other and to the subject. Intersectionality is useful for describing how different identities intersect across an entire society, but it does not always help to explain how a specific power relationship actually plays out.
posted by JZig at 2:11 PM on June 3 [1 favorite]

Another word that may be useful to you is "status". Performing arts practitioners often talk about status when discussing various ways people possess, wield, gain or lose power and how those transactions can be performed.

Keith Johnstone writes interestingly about status in his books about improv and Robert Cohen in his book Acting Power.

Interesting to me is how it is sometimes a power move to attempt to reduce your own status. eg. "No, no, I'm the worst"
posted by stray at 2:25 PM on June 3 [3 favorites]

This book: Power vs Force

Power is quiet and requires no explanation. Force is coercive and creates an automatic counterforce.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 2:46 PM on June 3

In general, I think the degree that power and privilege work synonymously depend on the degree to which physical violence is on the table. One issue with the word 'power', to me, is that it has explicit connotations of force that a term like 'privilege' doesn't.

For instance, if I get into an argument with a larger person, I may have all manner of privileges that he lacks. Very likely I do! But if he decides to hurt me, and even assuming that the police somehow get involved, no punishment will be imposed that isn't clearly preferable to being hurt in whatever manner he chooses to do so (this is in the UK - I can't speak to other jurisdictions). So in that situation, you'll have much more trouble convincing me that I have power than that I have privilege - I may have a "private law", but they have "capability that I lack" (for instance, to walk away from the conversation safely).

When I was at (and later taught at) all-boys boarding schools, this felt like the only meaningful kind of power, because violence was never many levels away from any interaction. Now that I'm an adult, it hardly ever comes up. But that's in itself a form of privilege!
posted by wattle at 4:18 PM on June 3 [4 favorites]

You could ask which country has a stronger military, or which side has killed more people on the other side.
But many of the strongest military powers in the world say they're in constant fear of attack, even though the countries attacking them have way less firepower.

What you're looking for in this case is called bargaining power. There's a whole literature on bargaining and war, the seminal article is Jim Fearon's 1995 paper, Rationalist Explanations for War. War results from bargaining failure, wartime fighting reveals information about each countries level of resolve and capabilities, etc. I don't think Foucault is relevant at all here.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:50 PM on June 3

I wrote this to explore these kinds of questions, perhaps you will find it helpful: A Field Guide to Social Power.
posted by ottereroticist at 5:05 PM on June 3 [4 favorites]

A lot of people have learned helplessness. I think this comes from the conditioning we get in society, starting with parents who need us to cooperate for our own protection and to just get get through the day, and teachers, at schools which are for the purpose of training us to sit when we are supposed to sit, and not blurt out anything we want to, and basically to do whatever other people are doing. We also have to learn this stuff when we interact with our community. It is considered critically important that we respect other people's land and don't do things like wander through their private space. Almost everything in our environment belongs to other people.

This means that most of us, confronted with a social situation are going to behave in predictable ways. We won't shove our way to the head of a queue, we won't ring a random stranger's doorbell, we won't throw our bag across a parking lot and abandon it, won't walk out of the room when someone is berating us. - We've been conditioned to behave in prosocial ways, to not bother strangers, to let teachers and bosses and authority figures scold us. And when we are confronted with a conflict we don't have any other responses in our repertoire. We may lose control and do those things we've been conditioned against - screaming if we panic, for example, but we are unlikely to start screaming unless we lose control, as opposed to having the chutzpah to shout, "Hey everyone, this man is following me!"

In a power conflict, being able to take our personal power and break norms is a really useful ability, and I think having the ability to break the norms is one of the things that decides who will win in a conflict. Bullies are usually people who are able to break the norms - to accuse people of doing things they didn't do, to stand too close to someone else, to touch other people's property, to touch strangers and many more things that would have gotten them booted out of Kindergarten. I don't think it's the lack of conditioning in their case however, because bullies usually can size up a situation and will only bully someone smaller than they are, as opposed to breaking the norms attacking someone stronger. They've been conditioned instead to only break the norms when they think they can get away with it.

Someone who is being threatened in a public place can often make themself much safer by making a scene. It's surprising how rarely people don't do that. If you're being harassed in public, shoving your way into a crowd, or ringing the nearest door bell or going into the nearest business that has unlocked doors all are the kind of actions that can get you out of the situation. Yet most people don't see the options that are open to them. People lose conflicts because they behave in socially predictable ways and people win them because they behave in ways that violate norms.



Another way people lose conflicts is because they can't bring themselves to actually hurt the other person - they have often spent their entire life avoiding hurting anyone else, and when they need to do it they don't have a clue how to do it - to the point where people won't even counter attack verbally, instead they will try to reason with someone or placate them when they are being attacked because their instincts goes entirely against being mean. This isn't just something that cowed and frightened people do. Sometimes we don't fight back, not because we are afraid, but the idea of being nasty to someone we could easily defeat if we tried feels wrong.

In war time a certain percentage of soldiers cannot bring themselves to actually aim at other people and fire a weapon, and will only shoot over the head of enemy soldiers even ones that are firing directly at them. The military has studied this extensively and puts a lot of effort into increasing the number of personnel who are willing to kill; to increase the numbers they have had to increase the distance. Often the only way to get someone to kill another person is to ensure that they can't see the people they are supposed to kill. People with guns have even been killed by unarmed people because they just couldn't bring themselves to shoot.



Those are two ways I can think of that make people lose interpersonal conflicts - the inability to actually deal with the conflict they are in, and the unwillingness to do harm to the person they are in conflict with.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:24 PM on June 3 [8 favorites]

>even a fearful person who thinks they're in danger or doing badly, might actually be pretty safe and doing very well relative to other demographics

Can I ask what the purpose of the exercise is, or what the context might be? Ultimately people’s existential concerns are their own and not really comparable. “Someone else has it worse off than you do” can help build perspective at times (often does me), but it might seem dismissive and invalidating to a given person at a given time.

I suppose you could look at statistics on particular outcomes (when third factors are *reasonably* excluded).
posted by cotton dress sock at 6:55 PM on June 3

This is a really interesting question. I think the key part in your example is very much the intense fear/anxiety surrounding the risk of physical harm. Ways to address that might be correcting misconceptions about the level of danger (including the racism factors), or by making the space safer (or just feel safer) somehow, like adding emergency call buttons, better lighting, more traffic, having unarmed but uniformed security/workers around, etc.

A key conflict in this specific case is that women are actively encouraged to be fearful and to trust and act on that fear (Gift of Fear-style) to be safer, and are often blamed for not doing that well enough if something does happen to them.

I don't think it will be very productive to approach it from the perspective of how the Black man will be treated by the police (despite that being a real issue) because if someone is genuinely, deeply afraid for their life or safety, whether rightly or wrongly, they aren't really going to have the capacity to care about the consequences for the other person.
posted by randomnity at 7:13 AM on June 4

There's definitely a balance between "don't downplay reality to comfort others" and "not all fears are justified." However, I think a potential use of learning about this kind of thing is, essentially, calibration of that balance. When is it safe to tolerate which risks? Rowdy youth on the street by a cafe I want to eat on the patio of are not a serious risk to me, even if I feel scared of the ways in which they're breaking the social norms. They're not in fact suddenly going to swarm and attack me, and even if they say rude things, I can just go inside and also the cafe staff (plus law enforcement if necessary) will help disperse them. Rationally, the suited businessman-looking person sitting next to me on the patio might be more of an actual danger, because they've got power and are probably used to getting their way. If such a person decides to verbally harass me, it's going to be harder to get away from them, and who's at fault will be much less clear to the average onlooker. If I find that risk tolerable, I can also sit with the risk represented by the kids, and realize I'm perfectly fine. Perhaps eventually they'll become as human to me as anyone else.
posted by teremala at 7:58 AM on June 4

Power is not a useful concept when considered as an isolated abstraction, because working out who has it is all about the specifics of what those people actually have the power to do. It's quite rare to be able to say that one person has "more power" than another in any kind of absolute sense.

As an absurdly unbalanced example: Vladimir Putin has more power than me to order politically advantageous invasions of Chechnya or Ukraine, but I have far more power than he does to go wherever I please without needing an accompanying security detail just to avoid being shot dead, so I would way rather have my life than his.
posted by flabdablet at 9:03 AM on June 4 [2 favorites]

Point I'm trying to make is that any attempt to reduce a notion as multidimensional as power to some kind of index for comparison purposes is going to involve a choice of weighting factors upon which any two people talking through a power issue are unlikely to agree absent explicit up-front discussion. Without that, they're just going to end up talking past one another.
posted by flabdablet at 9:10 AM on June 4

Response by poster: One interesting side effect of this question is hearing how different people perceive safety.

I’m a racial minority so I feel extremely unsafe when there are police or uniformed guards around. The hypothetical Black man in my example certainly would too. So a measure that would make the hypothetical white woman FEEL safer makes many others not only FEEL unsafe but actually it statistically does make the rest of us TRULY less safe.

On the contrary, I feel quite safe around teenage boys. Statistically, an adult woman is much more safe around teens than around adult men. To me, teens’ actions are less guarded and therefore easier to read and predict, they haven't had the life experience to amass as many dangerous triggers around power or masculinity, and they’re used to obeying women in leadership roles, since they live with their moms and female relatives, and they have female teachers. Plus I have Teacher Voice, so from experience, I know I can usually shock teens into hesitation if I really needed to.

This is telling me that people’s ideas of safety are so disparate that it’s hard to even intuit what kind of things they’re afraid of. It’s hard for us to conceptualize such personal experiences, especially when they’re very closely tied to the appearance of each person’s body, which we don’t and can’t inhabit.

Which is probably partly why convos about power are so hard- because two people may have exactly opposite experiences of what makes them feel safe, and totally not realize that they don’t mean the same thing at all when saying words like “fear”, “risk”, or “safe”, even when discussing pretty familiar shared experiences like neighbourhood crime.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 2:55 PM on June 4 [4 favorites]

I would supplement the guides mentioned above, like the wikipedia article and ottereroticist's guide, with Stephen Lukes' three dimensional approach. For a basic orientation on forms of power between two people, it's hard to do better than Kelsey Kauffman's typology "Power in a Prison," chapter four of her book Prison Officers and Their World. It was published by Harvard UP in the 1980s and now is online.
posted by diodotos at 10:59 AM on June 8