Power and the objectification of social targets.

TLDR

Objectification is historically defined as treating people as objects, a subjugation process, with implications for power psychology, goal pursuit, and self‑objectification theory. The authors hypothesized that objectification is a response to social power that involves approaching useful social targets regardless of the value of their other human qualities. Six studies showed that under power, approach toward a target is driven more by its usefulness to the perceiver's goals than in low‑power conditions, a pattern observed across multiple power manipulations, approach measures, goals, and target attributes.

Abstract

Objectification has been defined historically as a process of subjugation whereby people, like objects, are treated as means to an end. The authors hypothesized that objectification is a response to social power that involves approaching useful social targets regardless of the value of their other human qualities. Six studies found that under conditions of power, approach toward a social target was driven more by the target's usefulness, defined in terms of the perceiver's goals, than in low-power and baseline conditions. This instrumental response to power, which was linked to the presence of an active goal, was observed using multiple instantiations of power, different measures of approach, a variety of goals, and several types of instrumental and noninstrumental target attributes. Implications for research on the psychology of power, automatic goal pursuit, and self-objectification theory are discussed.