Sunday Assembly with Pamela Smith - Rethinking Power

As the evil CEO or moronic boss in every other TV show or movie shows us, “power corrupts.” Power is often depicted as a corrupting force that leads people to be selfish and lazy. However, a certain amount of power is necessary to accomplish what we need and want to do. Pamela Smith, Assistant Professor of Economics and Strategic Management at the Rady School of Management, UCSD, will move us away from thinking of power as inherently negative and instead focus on how power is value-neutral, discussing both how her research has demonstrated that power leads people to think more abstractly, taking a bigger-picture perspective, and how individuals can harness this idea both to feel more powerful themselves and to be perceived as more powerful by others.

Today’s Speaker: Pamela Smith

Pamela K. Smith is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Strategic Management at the Rady School of Management, UCSD. Receiving her Ph.D. in social psychology from New York University, during her graduate work she was awarded the Society of Experimental Social Psychology Dissertation Award and the New York University Stuart Cook Award in Social Psychology. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam and an assistant professor at Leiden University and Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on power: the degree to which one person has more control over valued resources than another. Smith’s areas of interest are the effect of power on people’s thinking, motivation, and behavior, and the subtle signals and signs people use to determine how much power they and others have. This work is strongly influenced by her fundamental interest in nonconscious processes more generally. In particular, she studies how individuals’ sense of their own and others’ power affects even processes below the level of awareness. Her work highlights how the inherently social construct of power has a multitude of internal psychological effects. Thus, throughout her research Smith studies the interplay between interpersonal and intrapersonal phenomena.

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Kids program is available for free at every Assembly.

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Stay after the assembly for coffee, snacks and to hang out with other assemblers

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Sunday Assembly San Diego is a new radically inclusive deity-free community that meets monthly to hear inspirational talks, connect for service projects, sing songs and generally celebrate life. Assemblies are free to attend, and everyone is welcome.

www.sundayassemblysandiego.org