External Control 385reward or threat of punishment could fail to influence peo-
ple’s thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Bases of Social Power
The ability to control someone’s behavior, whether by carrot
or stick, is synonymous with having power over that person.
Presumably, then, successful influence agents are those who
are seen—by the target at least—as possessing social power.
In contemporary society, power reflects more than physical
strength, immense wealth, or the capacity and readiness
to harm others—although having such attributes certainly
wouldn’t hurt under some circumstances. Social power
instead derives from a variety of different sources, each
providing a correspondingly distinct form of behavior con-
trol. The work of French and Raven (1959; Raven, 1992,
1993) is commonly considered the definitive statement on the
various bases of social power and their respective manifesta-
tions in everyday life. They identify six such bases: reward,
coercion, expertise, information, referent power, and legiti-
mate authority.
Reward powerderives, as the term implies, from the abil-
ity to provide desired outcomes to someone. The rewards
may be tangible and material (e.g., money, a nice gift), but
often they are more subtle and nonmaterial in nature (e.g., ap-
proval, affection). The compliance-for-reward exchange may
be direct and explicit, of course, as when a parent offers an
economic incentive to a child for doing his or her homework.
But the transaction is often tacit or implicit in the relationship
rather than directly stated. The salesperson who pushes used
cars with special zeal, for example, may do so because he or
she knows the company gives raises to those who meet a cer-
tain sales quota. Coercive powerderives from the ability to
provide aversive or otherwise undesired outcomes to some-
one. As with rewards, coercion can revolve around tangible
and concrete outcomes, such as the use or threat of physical
force, or instead involve outcomes that are nonmaterial and
acquire their valence by virtue of less tangible features. The
parent concerned with a child’s study habits might express
disapproval for the child’s shortcomings in this regard, for
example, and the salesperson might redouble his or her ef-
forts at moving stock for fear of losing his or her job.
Expert poweris accorded those who are perceived to have
superior knowledge or skills relevant to the target’s goals.
Deference to such individuals is common when the target
lacks direct personal knowledge regarding a topic or course
of action. In the physician-patient relationship, for example,
the patient typically complies with the physician’s instruc-
tions to take a certain medicine, even when the patient has no
idea how the purported remedy will cure him or her. Knowl-
edge, in other words, is power. Information poweris related
to expert power, except that it relates to the specific informa-
tion conveyed by the source, not to the source’s expertise
per se. A person could stumble on a piece of useful gossip, for
example, and despite his or her general ignorance in virtually
every aspect of his or her life, this person might wield con-
siderable power for a time over those who would benefit from
this information. Knowledge is power, it seems, even in the
hands of someone who doesn’t know what he or she is talk-
ing about.
Referent powerderives from people’s tendency to identify
with someone they respect or otherwise admire. “Be like
Mike” and “I am Tiger Woods,” for example, are successful
advertising slogans that play on consumers’ desire to be sim-
ilar to a cultural icon. The hoped-for similarity in such cases,
of course, is stunningly superficial—all the overpriced shoes
in the world won’t enable a teenager to defy gravity while
putting a basketball through a net or drive a small white ball
300 yards to the green in one stroke. Referent power is rarely
asserted in the form of a direct request, operating instead
through the pull of a desirable person, and can be manifest
without the physical presence or surveillance of the influence
agent. A young boy might shadow his older brother’s every
move, for example, even if the brother hardly notices, and an
aspiring writer might emulate Hemingway’s sparse writing
style even though it is fair to say this earnest adulation is
totally lost on Hemingway.
Legitimate powerderives from societal norms that accord
behavior control to individuals occupying certain roles. The
flight attendant who instructs 300 passengers to put their
tables in an upright position does not have a great deal of
reward or coercive power, nor is he or she seen as necessarily
possessing deep expertise pertaining to the request, and it is
even more unlikely that he or she is the subject of identifica-
tion fantasies for most of the passengers. Yet this person
wields enormous influence over the passengers because of
the legitimate authority he or she is accorded during the
flight. Legitimate power is often quite limited in scope. A
professor, for example, has the legitimate authority to sched-
ule exams but not to tell students how to conduct their per-
sonal lives—unless, of course, he or she also has referent
power for them. Legitimate power is clearly essential to soci-
etal coordination—imagine how traffic at a four-way inter-
section would fare if the signal lights failed and the police on
the scene had to rely on gifts or their personal charisma to
gain the cooperation of each driver. But blind obedience to
those in positions of legitimate authority also has enormous
potential for unleashing the worst in people, sometimes to the