Improbable research: furrowed eyebrows for the power-hungry

An experiment measured what happened when power-driven people gave speeches to an audience that responded with blatant, deliberate acts of boredom. The researchers, Eugene Fodor and David Wick of Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, wrote up the details in a blandly titled monograph, Need for Power and Affective Response to Negative Audience Reaction to an Extemporaneous Speech , in the Journal of Research in Personality. Fodor and Wick found some power-seekers and power-avoiders. They used a standard psychological method to identify these people. Fodor and Wick then asked each to give a three-minute persuasive speech to an audience. A wee, special audience – a woman and a man trained and rehearsed for the occasion. They "predicted that power-motivated participants would exhibit higher levels of electromyographic activity in the brow supercilii when confronted by a negative audience reaction to their speech". In this they used an established method, trusting that the electrical activity level in the forehead-frowning muscles would reliably indicate a person's anxiety level. For some speechgivers, the audience showed interest. But for others, not: "Fifteen seconds into the speech, the young woman crossed her legs and began looking at her hands. The young man shifted in his chair. The woman continued looking around. The man looked at his watch, then briefly out of the window. Approximately one min into the speech, the actors looked at each other and raised their eyebrows. They then looked back at the participant delivering the speech. Both continued to shift their gaze, rarely looking at the participant. Near the end, the woman gave off a visible sigh. The man, for his part, twiddled his thumbs a lot, looked at the clock a few times, yawned at specific junctures..." The results of the experiment: under this kind of duress, the power-hungry persons, compared with the non-power-hungry individuals, had noticeably greater eyebrow-furrowing muscle electrical activity. Fodor and Wick end their report with an eyebrow/anxiety-raising cautionary note for anyone who aspires to leadership. They specifically mention politicians and labour-management negotiators: "The findings ... suggest that certain occupations may pose repeated exposures to stress of a kind that can threaten cardiovascular health for persons high in power motivation." Marc Abrahams Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize