How Power Runs on Autopilot

Don't Let an Unconscious Pattern Make Your Decisions For You

Power is reflected and reinforced in interactions. And I don’t just mean power derived from the official status or position, I mean power as the ability to influence people to believe certain things or take certain actions.

For all of the talk about how power and authority show up in organizational structures or even in relationships in general, I want to talk about how power is reflected and reinforced in interactions.

The Loop

The Interpersonal Circumplex (IPC) is a model that maps interpersonal behavior along two orthogonal axes: dominance (or agency/control) and affiliation (or communion/warmth), but I want to focus on the dominance piece. The idea is simple: When one person asserts, the other tends to defer, and vice versa.

Studies have shown that one of the key empirical demonstrations of dominance complementarity is that when someone displaying dominant nonverbal behavior (expansive posture, direct gaze) tended to adopt submissive postures, and vice versa.

But critically, participants reported that these complementary pairings were actually more comfortable for both parties. People liked the interaction more and felt more at ease when the dominance signals were complementary rather than matched.

This means that comfortable hierarchical arrangements can emerge spontaneously through nonverbal reciprocal signaling—without any formal authority or explicit rules—meaning people are navigating roles (dominant/submissive) without those roles being authored or enforced by anyone.

What This Means

First of all, these dynamics are not inherently a problem. They emerge spontaneously if either side of the interaction takes up one of those two complementary positions. That doesn’t mean it’s inevitable, just that there is a dynamic and self-reinforcing interplay that can occur unintentionally.

Which means that, left unchecked or unconscious, these patterns can become default decision-making processes. So, what can we do about it? Well, in addition to just being more aware of the dynamic generally, we can also design some safety checks.

1. Time-boxed Check-Ins

Set a timer on each thread of conversation. When it goes off, pause and reset. If the same dynamic reasserts itself, fine. If it doesn’t, also fine. The point is that the structure creates a neutral moment for recalibration—without anyone having to call out the pattern directly.

2. Clarify Roles

At any point, you can ask if the other person is willing to play a certain conversational role like, proposer, critic, facilitator, etc. Or you can ask if that is what they would like (“Are you looking for my honest opinion on this, or are you looking just to vent a bit? Either one is fine with me…I just want to know how I can help”).

3. Separate Speaking from Deciding

Split the conversation into an input phase (everyone contributes, no decisions) and a decision phase (someone with the authority decides). Dominance complementarity does its most consequential work by collapsing these two acts—the dominant person speaks and it functionally becomes the decision. Separating them structurally makes that collapse harder.

Conclusion

None of these moves require you to diagnose the dynamic in real time or to develop superhuman self-awareness. They work because they insert structure into the interaction at the points where dominance complementarity does its work invisibly. The dynamic doesn't go away—it doesn't need to. You just want to make sure that you're the one making the decision, not an unconscious pattern making it on your behalf.