Job interview: the importance of body posture

I’d like to start by offering a free, analog form to improve life and all we need is that you change your postures for two minutes. But before I do, I want to ask you right now to do a little audit of their bodies and what they are doing with them. How many of you are kind of cringing? Maybe hunchbacks, crossing their legs, maybe crossing the ankles. Sometimes we hold each other in our arms like this. Sometimes we open up. (Laughs) I’m seeing you. (Laughs) I want you to pay attention to what you’re doing right now. We’ll come back to that in a few minutes, and hopefully if they learned to adjust a little bit, it changes the way your life unfolds.

We are fascinated by body language, and we are particularly interested in other people’s body language. You know, we’re interested in, yeah, you know — (Laughter) an awkward interaction, or a smile, or a contemplative glance, or maybe an awkward wink or perhaps a handshake.

Narrator: Here they are arriving at ‘Number 10’ (the Prime Minister’s residence), and look, the lucky cop got to shake the president’s hand from United States. and here comes the prime minister of the — ? Not. (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) (Applause)

Amy Cuddy: So a handshake, or lack thereof, can keep us talking for weeks and weeks and weeks. Even the BBC and the New York Times. Obviously when we think of non-verbal behavior, or body language – but we call it non-verbal as social scientists – it is language, so it takes us back to communication. When we think of communication, we think of interaction. So what is your body telling me? And what is mine communicating to you?

And there are many reasons to believe that this is a valid way. to look at it. social scientists spent a lot of time looking at the effects of our body language, or others, in trials. And we make sweeping judgments and inferences from body language. And these judgments can predict real lives ahead. like who we hire or promote, who we ask on a date. For example, Nalini Ambady, a researcher at Tufts University shows that when people watch 30-second silent clips real interactions between doctor and patient, your judgment of the doctor’s kindness predicts whether or not it will be processed.

It doesn’t have so much to do with whether the doctor was incompetent, but we like that person and how did they interact? Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton showed us what judgments the candidates face in just one second predicts 70 percent of the US senate and the decision of the gubernatorial race, and even, let’s go to the digital world, emoticons well used in online trading can lead you to attribute more value to that negotiation. If you use it improperly, bad idea. Right? So when we think about nonverbals, we think about how we judge others, how they judge us and the consequences. However, we tend to forget the other audience that is influenced by the non-verbal that we are.

We are also influenced by non-verbals, our thoughts, our feelings and our physiology. What nonverbals am I talking about? I’m a social psychologist. I study prejudice, and I teach at the competitive business school, so it was inevitable that I became interested in power dynamics. I was especially interested in non-verbal expressions of power and domination.

And what are the non-verbal expressions of power and domination? Well, these are the ones. In the animal kingdom, they are about expansion. So you make yourself big, stretch yourself, takes up space, you basically open yourself up. It’s about opening up. and that’s true throughout the animal kingdom. It is not limited to primates. And humans do the same. (Laughs) They do this when they have stable power. and also when they are feeling powerful in that moment. And this one is especially interesting because it really shows us how universal and ancient these expressions of power are. This expression, which is known as pride, Jessica Tracy studied. It shows that people born with sight and people who are blind from birth do this when they win a physical competition.

So when they cross the finish line and they’ve won it doesn’t matter if you’ve never seen anyone do it. They do. Arms up in a V, chin slightly lifted. What do we do when we feel weakened? we do exactly the opposite. We closed. We bend. We make ourselves smaller. We don’t want to bump into the person next to us. Again, both animals and humans do the same thing. And this is what happens when you put it together loud and low power. what tends to happen when it comes to power, we complement non-verbal others. So if someone is exercising power over us, the tendency is for people to diminish. We don’t look up to them. We do the opposite of what they do.

So I see this behavior in classrooms, and what do I notice? I realize that MBA students actually exhibit all the non-verbal characteristics. Some people are caricatures of alphas, when they enter the room, they go to the middle of the room before class started, as if they wanted to take up space. When they sit down, they spread out. Raise your hands like this. Other People Who Are Virtually Collapsed when they enter. As soon as they come in, you see it.

You see it on their faces and on their bodies, and they sit in their chairs and curl up, and they raise their hand like this. I noticed a few things about it, One, it won’t surprise you. It seems gender-related. Women are much more into doing this than men. Women chronically feel less empowered than men, so this is no surprise. But the other thing I realized is that this also seems related to which students were participating, and how well they were participating. And that’s really important in the MBA class, because participation counts as half of the grade.

So business schools have struggled with this gender gap. You get equally qualified men and women and then you notice differences in the grades, and seems to be attributed in part to participation, So I started to think, okay, you have these people coming in like that, and they’re participating. Is it possible to make some people pretend and would that make them participate more?

My main contributor Dana Carney, who is at Berkeley, and i really wanted to know, can you fake it till you make it? You can do this for a little while and in fact going through a behavior change that makes you seem more powerful? We know that our nonverbals rule like others think and feel about us. There are many evidences. But our question really was, will our non-verbals govern our feelings and thoughts about ourselves?

There is evidence that yes. For example, we smile when we are happy. but also, when we are forced to smile holding a pen between your teeth like that makes us feel happy. So it goes both ways. In the power, it also goes both ways. So when you feel powerful, there are more chances that you will do this, but it is also possible that when you pretend to be powerful, you are more likely to you really feel powerful.

So the second question really was, we know that our minds change our bodies, but is it also true that our bodies change our minds? And when I say minds, in the case of the mighty, what am I talking about? I’m talking about thoughts and feelings and the kind of physiological things that shape our thoughts and feelings, and in my case, it’s the hormones. I look at hormones. How the minds of the powerful versus the powerless they look alike?

Powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly, more assertive and more confident, more optimistic. They really think they’re going to win even at games of chance. They also tend to be able to think more abstractly. There are several differences. They risk more. There are many differences between the powerful and the powerless. Physiologically, there are also differences in two key hormones: testosterone, which is the dominant hormone, and cortisol, which is the stress hormone.

So what we think is that super powerful alpha males in the primate hierarchy have high testosterone and low cortisol, and powerful and effective leaders also have high testosterone and low cortisol, What does that mean? When you think of power, the tendency was to think only about testosterone, because it was about domination. But really, power is also about how you react to stress. You want the most powerful leader who is dominant with high testosterone but super reactive to stress? Probably not, right? you want the person who is strong and assertive and dominant, but who doesn’t react too much to stress, a relaxed person.

We know that in the primate hierarchy, if an alpha needs to dominate, if an individual is to perform an alpha role all of a sudden, in a few days, that individual’s testosterone will rise significantly and your cortisol will drop significantly. So we have this evidence, so much that the body can shape the mind, at least on the facial level, and also that role changes can shape the mind. What happens, ok, you change roles, what happens if you do a minimum manipulation, a minimum intervention? “For two minutes,” you say, “I want you to stay in this position, and that will make you feel stronger.”

That’s what we did. We decided to bring people to the lab and do a little experiment, and these people adopted for two minutes both high power poses how low power and i’ll show you guys five of those poses, even though they only did two. Here’s one. Some more. This one was called “Wonder Woman” by the media. Some more. You can stand or sit. And those are the low power poses. You are folding, shrinking. This is very low power. When you touch your neck, you are actually protecting yourself. This is what happens. They come in, spit into a container, we say for two minutes what they should do. They don’t look at photos of the poses. we don’t want to impose a concept of power. We want them to feel the power, right? Two minutes they do it. So we ask, “How powerful did you feel?” on a series of items, and we give them the opportunity to bluff and then we collect another saliva sample. That’s it. This is the complete experiment.

This is what we found. Risk tolerance, which is bluffing, what we think is that when you have a lot of power 86 percent of you will bluff. When you are in a powerless position, only 60 percent, and that difference is significant. Look what we found out about testosterone. From their baselines when they enter, people with high power experience a 20 percent increase and people with low power experience a 10 percent drop.

So again, two minutes and you see these changes. See what happens to cortisol….