Rucker and his colleagues found that audiences who felt powerful were more swayed by pitches that focused on competence and skillfulness, whereas those who felt powerless were more persuaded by pitches that emphasized warmth and sincerity. This research challenges a long-discussed assumption that powerful people always hold sway and powerless people are always easier to bend.

Rucker and his coauthors—David Dubois of INSEAD and Adam Galinsky of Columbia University—explored the relationship between power and persuasion in four experiments. The experiments rely on techniques to temporarily affect how powerful participants feel in the moment. In one experiment, for instance, participants were asked to write sentences using either powerful words (like “authority” and “dominates”) or powerless ones (like “obey” and “submits”). In another, participants were told to recall an instance in which they felt either powerful or powerless.

After being placed into a state of low or high power, participants were assigned to be either communicators or audience members. Communicators were tasked with persuading the audience to, for example, use a new gym facility or dine at a specific restaurant. In multiple experiments, the researchers had either “high-power communicators” or “low-power communicators” deliver messages to “high-power audiences” or “low-power audiences.”

Across the experiments, the researchers observed two clear trends.

First, the power of the communicator influenced the type of arguments they used. High-power communicators gravitated toward more competence-related arguments, whereas low-power communicators used more warmth-related arguments.

Second, high-power audiences were more persuaded by messages from high-power communicators. And low-power audiences were more persuaded by messages from low-power communicators.