Feeling powerless could also change your perceptions of how much physical strength you have, a new study suggests.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge found an association between feeling powerless and perceiving things to be heavier than they actually are.
"This research demonstrates that people's social role, as indicated by a sense of social power, or a lack therefore, can change the way they see the physical environment," study researcher Eun Hee Lee said in a statement.
The Journal of Experimental Psychology study included three experiments. In the first, researchers gauged feelings of power in 145 study participants by having them say how much they agreed with statements such as "I can get people to listen to what I say." Then, the researchers had the participants lift several boxes and guess the weight of each. The participants whose answers to the statements earlier depicted lower feelings of social power were more likely to say the boxes were heavier, compared with those who reported higher feelings of social power.
In the second experiment, 41 study participants were asked to again do the task involving lifting boxes and guessing their weight. Then, they were assigned to sit in either a powerful position (with one elbow on the arm of a chair, and the other on a desk) or a more submissive position (hands under thighs). Then, they again lifted the boxes and guessed their weights. Researchers found that before the participants were assigned to sit in the powerful or diminutive positions, all the participants overestimated how much the boxes weighed. But after being assigned to sit in those positions, the ones who were assigned to sit powerfully lowered their weight estimates so that they were more accurate, while those assigned to sit in the submissive position still overestimated the weights.
In the third experiment, 68 study participants recalled a time they either felt powerful or powerless. Then, they underwent the same box-weighing task. The participants who recalled a powerless moment overestimated the weight of the boxes, while the participants who recalled the powerful moment were more accurate in their estimations.
Powerlessness isn't the only sensation that can make things seem heavier. A recent study in the journal PLOS ONE also showed that guilt can have a weighing-down effect. In that study, researchers found that when people thought about a time they committed a wrongdoing, they perceived themselves as weighing more.