Knowledge, Literacy, and Power

The importance of content knowledge and reading practices to the achievement of power was studied with adults. Relationships were examined among general, "mainstream" society knowledge, domain specific political knowledge, the amount of reading engaged in and three indicators of power, occupation, income and political activity. Care was taken to ensure that extraneous cognitive processing variance did not influence the results by using simple checklists of declarative knowledge that required listeners, on the telephone, to simply say "yes" if they thought they recognized a given factual stimulus. The results of two studies indicated that there were positive relationships among amount of content knowledge, reading and power, even when age, education and ethnicity were held constant. The latter is important because it indicates that regardless of one's cultural background, possession of large "banks" of declarative knowledge about the "mainstream" culture of the United States is associated with achieving and manifesting power.