Injustice and powerseeking

Lay perception and scientific accounts of powerseeking are rather uniformly negative, portraying powerseeking as dispositionally driven behavior with self-interested or antisocial md gins. The present research suggests that p owerseeking may be pro socially motivated, with situational rather than exc lusively dispositional origins. Two experiments demonstrated that power-see king motivation and powerseeking behavior are reliably motivated by the per ception of injustice Both experiments revealed that injustice-inspired powe rseeking is mediated by the degree to which a situation is perceived to be wrong violates beliefs regarding fairness, and inspires feelings of anger o r upset. In addition, Experiment 2 revealed that the scope of justice conce rns is relatively broad, in that powerseeking is not limited to injustice i nvolving close victims.