title: "While you still think, I already type": experienced social power reduces deliberation during e-mail communication.
abstract: E-mail allows individuals to deliberate on their communication before sending it off. For instance, communication partners can easily take their time to ponder how best to frame a request before they actually send a message. Individuals at times strategically exploit this opportunity to deliberate in order to tailor messages to their communication partner, such as when communicating with a relatively more powerful person. As social power reduces concerns about impression management, we predicted that individuals deliberate more while composing e-mail messages under low (vs. high) power. This assumption was tested with well-established power priming. As such, we expected that experienced power in one context would diminish deliberation times during a subsequent e-mail communication. An experiment manipulating the experience of (low vs. high) power and measuring deliberation times during e-mail composition supported this hypothesis. The findings thus indicate how social power alters deliberation times. More importantly, the results show that individuals not only strategically deliberate during e-mail communication in line with their current situation, but also in line with their social standing in a previous situation (here, their experience of power).
authors.affiliation: Social Processes Lab, Knowledge Media Research Center , Tübingen, Germany .
authors.forename: Annika
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Scholl
authors.forename: Kai
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Sassenberg
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003142:Communication; D034742:Electronic Mail; D056344:Executive Function; D005260:Female; D006608:Hierarchy, Social; D006801:Humans; D007389:Internal-External Control; D008297:Male; D011209:Power, Psychological; D011214:Practice, Psychological; D011930:Reaction Time; D012919:Social Behavior; D013850:Thinking; D055815:Young Adult