Injustice and Powerseeking

Abstract

Lay perception and scientific accounts of powerseeking are rather uniformly negative, portraying powerseeking as dispositionally driven behavior with self-interested or antisocial origins. The present research suggests that powerseeking may be prosocially motivated, with situational rather than exclusively dispositional origins. Two experiments demonstrated that powerseeking motivation and powerseeking behavior are reliably motivated by the perception of injustice. Both experiments revealed that injustice-inspired powerseeking is mediated by the degree to which a situation is perceived to be wrong, violates beliefs regarding fairness, and inspires feelings of anger or upset. In addition, Experiment 2 revealed that the scope of justice concerns is relatively broad, in that powerseeking is not limited to injustice involving close victims.