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Emotional Intelligence
The Power We Have Over Each Other
Why a poor woman's words can hurt the king.
Updated March 30, 2024 Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
In a historical drama I saw as a child, there was a scene that stayed with me: a royal procession was passing through a town, and a poor woman began to stridently chastise the king, faulting him for misfortunes that had befallen the kingdom. As a viewer, I knew I was to conclude that the woman’s words produced a strong effect on the king. The king’s guards marched toward the woman, ready to remove her and, perhaps, to punish her for alleged insolence, but the king stopped them. I believe he also said something in response to the woman in an attempt to defend himself against her accusations – though of that I am not completely certain. Then the procession left.
I’ve thought of this scene repeatedly over the years. I thought of it again recently, when I heard a junior researcher who had written a negative review of a work by a senior and famous scholar say that he was surprised to learn the senior and famous person was hurt by the negative comments. It seemed to him that he simply did not have the power to hurt the well-established colleague. He perceived his own criticisms as something of a howling at the moon. After all, he was still a nobody.
The woman from the historical drama had more insight into human nature than the researcher did. I think she believed – correctly – that her words could produce an effect on the king, "get under his skin," as it were, though she probably sensed also that she had to break ranks and address the royal without deference in order to make herself heard.
As a general matter, I think we are more prone to see ourselves as the researcher saw himself – as people whose words and deeds are unlikely to have a great effect on others. There is typically an asymmetry in the way we see others and the way we see ourselves: We are often acutely aware of the power others have over us but not of our own reciprocal influence.
It is, of course, possible – and given the variety in human temperaments, true of someone somewhere – for the two tendencies to come apart. A person may care so little about what others say that she concludes on that basis that her own words cannot have a strong effect on others either. But this is likely an unusual case. A more likely scenario involves a tendency to be aware of what others can do to us but not of what we can do to them.
Why?
Perceived Hierarchy
The cases I began with give us one clue: perceived asymmetry in social status can undermine our sense of agency. But why?
I think much of the explanation has to do with the way in which we may fail to see the person beneath the social distinctions. To drive this point home, consider a situation in which people are trapped on an island after a shipwreck and they all wear tattered clothes or a case in which the beggar and the king find themselves sharing a prison cell. How much would social distinctions matter then? Not much. The new circumstances would, in fact, show their largely illusory character. (An idea along these lines is explored by J. M. Barrie in the play The Admirable Crighton, a play in which a group of aristocrats and their former butler find themselves on a deserted island, and the butler becomes the leader of the group.) But the illusion persists in many ordinary circumstances.
I suspect that this explains a phenomenon frequently remarked upon: the innocent cruelty of children. It is probably not malice or callousness that makes children cruel in their dealings with adults; more likely, it is their lack of awareness of the power their words can have on adults. I suspect most children simply don’t know that what they say can hurt an adult and indeed, greatly. Adults know better.
Our Own Pain
Another factor, I think, is the reality of the pain we experience and the elusive nature of the pain we cause. We don’t know what the pain we cause feels like to the other person, but we know exactly what the pain we suffer at the hands of others is like. This may lead us to see ourselves as passive recipients of the good or ill will of others, rather than as actors who can influence those around us in turn.
In extreme cases, this tendency can lead a person to adopt a victim stance with regard to his or her own life or to completely externalize the locus of control over life events, but here, I am interested in the widespread, garden-variety tendency.
It is important to note that in some cases, there may be a very good reason for the words of one person to have more weight. If a chess beginner is taking lessons from a very advanced player, it is all too natural for the beginner to care more about the instructor’s evaluation than vice versa. What is interesting is that even when there are asymmetries of this sort that would justify the differential impact of words, the words of either party can have an effect, and a strong one at that. Our words always have the potential to affect our hearers. Especially, perhaps, when there is truth – perhaps a perceptive and hurtful truth – to what we say. This brings me to my last point.
The Truth Hurts
One of the main reasons our words can affect another – and affect her deeply – is that everyone has the power to say something negative and true, and truths can hurt.
This is not to suggest that unfair and baseless comments may not have some such effect also, but it is to say that remarks which zoom in on a real feature of another’s character or actions – a feature which does not even have to be bad, just one the other doesn’t want to have – can predictably cause pain no matter who utters them.
Where does all this leave us? The lesson I wish to draw is that we are all in each other’s spheres of influence. We are each other's emotional captives. We risk both hurting others unnecessarily and undermining our own self-esteem if we see ourselves sensitive to the power of others over us but not to our own over them.
A character in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out says that horses probably see us humans as being three times as big as we really are or else they’d never obey us. I don’t know about horses, but it seems to me this tendency to see others in an exaggerated way is an all-too-human one. More importantly, what we truly miss here is that this is how others tend to see us as well: We are the other for those around us; the other with the power to hurt.
