Powerful people rely on gut feelings for decisions

London: People who have social power tend to rely a lot on their internal body cues when taking important decisions, suggests new research.

The research looked at how the easiness of high power individuals' motor actions impacted their judgments.

To illustrate, in the experiments people wrote about situations in which they had power over someone else or in which someone else had power over them. Each experiment then targeted a different motor action.

For example, one experiment trained people's extra ocular muscles - the muscles that move the eyes - to later see specific movements of a dot on a screen.

When the eye muscles were trained to see the movement (and thus when perception was easy), the movement was liked more than when the muscles were not trained to see the movement (and thus when perception was more difficult).