1、So I want to start by offering you a free no-tech life hack, and all it requires of you is this: that you change your posture for two minutes. But before I give it away, I want to ask you to right now do a little audit of your body and what youre doing with your body. So how many of you are sort of
2、making yourselves smaller? Maybe youre hunching, crossing your legs, maybe wrapping your ankles. Sometimes we hold onto our arms like this. Sometimes we spread out. (Laughter) I see you. So I want you to pay attention to what youre doing right now. Were going to come back to that in a few minutes, a
3、nd Im hoping that if you learn to tweak this a little bit, it could significantly change the way your life unfolds. So, were really fascinated with body language, and were particularly interested in other peoples body language. You know, were interested in, like, you know (Laughter) an awkward inter
4、action, or a smile, or a contemptuous glance, or maybe a very awkward wink, or maybe even something like a handshake. Narrator: Here they are arriving at Number 10. This lucky policeman gets to shake hands with the President of the United States. Here comes the Prime Minister - No. (Laughter) (Appla
5、use) Amy Cuddy: So a handshake, or the lack of a handshake, can have us talking for weeks and weeks and weeks. Even the BBC and The New York Times. So obviously when we think about nonverbal behavior, or body language - but we call it nonverbals as social scientists - its language, so we think about
6、 communication. When we think about communication, we think about interactions. So what is your body language communicating to me? Whats mine communicating to you? And theres a lot of reason to believe that this is a valid way to look at this. So social scientists have spent a lot of time looking at
7、 the effects of our body language, or other peoples body language, on judgments. And we make sweeping judgments and inferences from body language. And those judgments can predict really meaningful life outcomes like who we hire or promote, who we ask out on a date. For example, Nalini Ambady, a rese
8、archer at Tufts University, shows that when people watch 30-second soundless clips of real physician-patient interactions, their judgments of the physicians niceness predict whether or not that physician will be sued. So it doesnt have to do so much with whether or not that physician was incompetent
9、, but do we like that person and how they interacted? Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates faces in just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes, and even, lets go digital, emoticons used well in online
10、 negotiations can lead to you claim more value from that negotiation. If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right? So when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge others, how they judge us and what the outcomes are. We tend to forget, though, the other audience thats influenced by our nonverbal
11、s, and thats ourselves. We are also influenced by our nonverbals, our thoughts and our feelings and our physiology. So what nonverbals am I talking about? Im a social psychologist. I study prejudice, and I teach at a competitive business school, so it was inevitable that I would become interested in
12、 power dynamics. I became especially interested in nonverbal expressions of power and dominance. And what are nonverbal expressions of power and dominance? Well, this is what they are. So in the animal kingdom, they are about expanding. So you make yourself big, you stretch out, you take up space, y
13、oure basically opening up. Its about opening up. And this is true across the animal kingdom. Its not just limited to primates. And humans do the same thing. (Laughter) So they do this both when they have power sort of chronically, and also when theyre feeling powerful in the moment. And this one is
14、especially interesting because it really shows us how universal and old these expressions of power are. This expression, which is known as pride, Jessica Tracy has studied. She shows that people who are born with sight and people who are congenitally blind do this when they win at a physical competi
15、tion. So when they cross the finish line and theyve won, it doesnt matter if theyve never seen anyone do it. They do this. So the arms up in the V, the chin is slightly lifted. What do we do when we feel powerless? We do exactly the opposite. We close up. We wrap ourselves up. We make ourselves smal
16、l. We dont want to bump into the person next to us. So again, both animals and humans do the same thing. And this is what happens when you put together high and low power. So what we tend to do when it comes to power is that we complement the others nonverbals. So if someone is being really powerful
17、 with us, we tend to make ourselves smaller. We dont mirror them. We do the opposite of them. So Im watching this behavior in the classroom, and what do I notice? I notice that MBA students really exhibit the full range of power nonverbals. So you have people who are like caricatures of alphas, real
18、ly coming into the room, they get right into the middle of the room before class even starts, like they really want to occupy space. When they sit down, theyre sort of spread out. They raise their hands like this. You have other people who are virtually collapsing when they come in. As soon they com
19、e in, you see it. You see it on their faces and their bodies, and they sit in their chair and they make themselves tiny, and they go like this when they raise their hand. I notice a couple of things about this. One, youre not going to be surprised. It seems to be related to gender. So women are much
20、 more likely to do this kind of thing than men. Women feel chronically less powerful than men, so this is not surprising. But the other thing I noticed is that it also seemed to be related to the extent to which the students were participating, and how well they were participating. And this is reall
21、y important in the MBA classroom, because participation counts for half the grade. So business schools have been struggling with this gender grade gap. You get these equally qualified women and men coming in and then you get these differences in grades, and it seems to be partly attributable to part
22、icipation. So I started to wonder, you know, okay, so you have these people coming in like this, and theyre participating. Is it possible that we could get people to fake it and would it lead them to participate more? So my main collaborator Dana Carney, whos at Berkeley, and I really wanted to know
23、, can you fake it till you make it? Like, can you do this just for a little while and actually experience a behavioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful? So we know that our nonverbals govern how other people think and feel about us. Theres a lot of evidence. But our question really was, do
24、our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves? Theres some evidence that they do. So, for example, we smile when we feel happy, but also, when were forced to smile by holding a pen in our teeth like this, it makes us feel happy. So it goes both ways. When it comes to power, it also goe
25、s both ways. So when you feel powerful, youre more likely to do this, but its also possible that when you pretend to be powerful, you are more likely to actually feel powerful. So the second question really was, you know, so we know that our minds change our bodies, but is it also true that our bodi
26、es change our minds? And when I say minds, in the case of the powerful, what am I talking about? So Im talking about thoughts and feelings and the sort of physiological things that make up our thoughts and feelings, and in my case, thats hormones. I look at hormones. So what do the minds of the powe
27、rful versus the powerless look like? So powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly, more assertive and more confident, more optimistic. They actually feel theyre going to win even at games of chance. They also tend to be able to think more abstractly. So there are a lot of differences. They take m
28、ore risks. There are a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people. Physiologically, there also are differences on two key hormones: testosterone, which is the dominance hormone, and cortisol, which is the stress hormone. So what we find is that high-power alpha males in primate hierarc
29、hies have high testosterone and low cortisol, and powerful and effective leaders also have high testosterone and low cortisol. So what does that mean? When you think about power, people tended to think only about testosterone, because that was about dominance. But really, power is also about how you
30、 react to stress. So do you want the high-power leader thats dominant, high on testosterone, but really stress reactive? Probably not, right? You want the person whos powerful and assertive and dominant, but not very stress reactive, the person whos laid back. So we know that in primate hierarchies,
31、 if an alpha needs to take over, if an individual needs to take over an alpha role sort of suddenly, within a few days, that individuals testosterone has gone up significantly and his cortisol has dropped significantly. So we have this evidence, both that the body can shape the mind, at least at the
32、 facial level, and also that role changes can shape the mind. So what happens, okay, you take a role change, what happens if you do that at a really minimal level, like this tiny manipulation, this tiny intervention? “For two minutes,“ you say, “I want you to stand like this, and its going to make y
33、ou feel more powerful.“ So this is what we did. We decided to bring people into the lab and run a little experiment, and these people adopted, for two minutes, either high-power poses or low-power poses, and Im just going to show you five of the poses, although they took on only two. So heres one. A
34、 couple more. This one has been dubbed the “Wonder Woman“ by the media. Here are a couple more. So you can be standing or you can be sitting. And here are the low-power poses. So youre folding up, youre making yourself small. This one is very low-power. When youre touching your neck, youre really pr
35、otecting yourself. So this is what happens. They come in, they spit into a vial, for two minutes, we say, “You need to do this or this.“ They dont look at pictures of the poses. We dont want to prime them with a concept of power. We want them to be feeling power. So two minutes they do this. We then
36、 ask them, “How powerful do you feel?“ on a series of items, and then we give them an opportunity to gamble, and then we take another saliva sample. Thats it. Thats the whole experiment. So this is what we find. Risk tolerance, which is the gambling, we find that when you are in the high-power pose
37、condition, 86 percent of you will gamble. When youre in the low-power pose condition, only 60 percent, and thats a whopping significant difference. Heres what we find on testosterone. From their baseline when they come in, high-power people experience about a 20-percent increase, and low-power peopl
38、e experience about a 10-percent decrease. So again, two minutes, and you get these changes. Heres what you get on cortisol. High-power people experience about a 25-percent decrease, and the low-power people experience about a 15-percent increase. So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that co
39、nfigure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and feeling sort of shut down. And weve all had the feeling, right? So it seems that our nonverbals do govern how we think and feel about ourselves, so its not just others, but its also ourselv
40、es. Also, our bodies change our minds. But the next question, of course, is, can power posing for a few minutes really change your life in meaningful ways? This is in the lab, its this little task, its just a couple of minutes. Where can you actually apply this? Which we cared about, of course. And
41、so we think where you want to use this is evaluative situations, like social threat situations. Where are you being evaluated, either by your friends? For teenagers, its at the lunchroom table. For some people its speaking at a school board meeting. It might be giving a pitch or giving a talk like t
42、his or doing a job interview. We decided that the one that most people could relate to because most people had been through, was the job interview. So we published these findings, and the media are all over it, and they say, Okay, so this is what you do when you go in for the job interview, right? Y
43、ou know, so we were of course horrified, and said, Oh my God, no, thats not what we meant at all. For numerous reasons, no, dont do that. Again, this is not about you talking to other people. Its you talking to yourself. What do you do before you go into a job interview? You do this. Youre sitting d
44、own. Youre looking at your iPhone - or your Android, not trying to leave anyone out. Youre looking at your notes, youre hunching up, making yourself small, when really what you should be doing maybe is this, like, in the bathroom, right? Do that. Find two minutes. So thats what we want to test. Okay
45、? So we bring people into a lab, and they do either high- or low-power poses again, they go through a very stressful job interview. Its five minutes long. They are being recorded. Theyre being judged also, and the judges are trained to give no nonverbal feedback, so they look like this. Imagine this
46、 is the person interviewing you. So for five minutes, nothing, and this is worse than being heckled. People hate this. Its what Marianne LaFrance calls “standing in social quicksand.“ So this really spikes your cortisol. So this is the job interview we put them through, because we really wanted to s
47、ee what happened. We then have these coders look at these tapes, four of them. Theyre blind to the hypothesis. Theyre blind to the conditions. They have no idea whos been posing in what pose, and they end up looking at these sets of tapes, and they say, “We want to hire these people,“ all the high-p
48、ower posers. “We dont want to hire these people. We also evaluate these people much more positively overall.“ But whats driving it? Its not about the content of the speech. Its about the presence that theyre bringing to the speech. Because we rate them on all these variables related to competence, l
49、ike, how well-structured is the speech? How good is it? What are their qualifications? No effect on those things. This is whats affected. These kinds of things. People are bringing their true selves, basically. Theyre bringing themselves. They bring their ideas, but as themselves, with no, you know, residue over them. So this is whats driving the effect, or mediating the effect. So when I tell people about this, that our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior, and our behav
