Powerblindness

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man may be king. But positions of power may produce their own forms of blindness. This paper reviews multiple theoretical approaches to the concept of powerblindness and categorizes these literatures into five forms through which powerblindness operates: powerblind identity (failure to notice that one belongs to a privileged group), powerblind egalitarianism (belief that all groups are equal in power), powerblind hierarchy (emphasis on one's own subordinate position), powerblind exception (the claim that one is less privileged than others in one's group), and powerblind justification (belief that present-day hierarchy is merited or inevitable). The paper identifies studies offering evidence for each, drawing on social-psychological experiments, survey data, and qualitative research, suggesting that power and knowledge do not necessarily go hand in hand - some forms of knowledge about the social order may be more visible to people with less power than to people with more.