Power Hour.(The Talk of the Town)

Anecdotally, powerful people seem inclined to do certain things (FedEx their luggage, order off the menu, keep immaculate desks) and not to do others (place their own calls, carry cash, learn how to e-mail, admit to sleeping). To academics, one of the best indicators of a person's place in a hierarchy is his tendency toward "perspective taking"--"stepping outside of one's own experience and imagining the emotions, perceptions, and motivations of another individual," as it is defined in "Power and Perspectives Not Taken," a paper published, in 2006, in the journal Psychological Science. An assistant is perspective taking when he gets the boss's coffee before he asks for it; when the boss forgets to pay the assistant back the $3.75, he is not.

The hypothesis of the Psychological Science study was that the more power a person has, the less capacity he has to take another person's perspective. To test the theory, Joe Magee, an assistant professor at the Wagner School of Public Service, at N.Y.U., along with co-authors from Northwestern and Stanford, conducted four experiments. In one, fifty-seven undergraduates were divided into two groups, one whose members were primed to feel powerful by being asked to write about a situation in which they had had dominion over another person. The members of the other, "low power" group were asked to write about an incident in which they had been at another person's mercy. Each participant was then presented with a set of instructions:

Task 1. With your dominant hand, as quickly as you can, snap your fingers five times., Task 2. With your dominant hand, as quickly as you can, draw a capital E on your forehead with the marker provided. Don't worry, the marker is nontoxic, and we will make sure it is removed before you leave today.

There are two ways to draw the "E": with the prongs of the letter facing so that the person drawing can read it ("self-oriented"), or with the prongs pointing in the opposite direction ("other-oriented"). The researchers concluded that the high-power group was almost three times as likely as the low-power group to draw an "E" that would be illegible to anyone but themselves. (Or: B = -1.51, SE = 0.76, prep = .88.)

An amateur researcher recently decided that the Time 100 banquet--champagne, lamb chops, "the most influential people in the world"--held the other night at Jazz at Lincoln Center, would be the perfect occasion for a copycat experiment. The researcher ditched the finger-snapping thing, and armed herself with a royal-blue Flair pen and a fresh pad of ...