Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are | Amy Cuddy | TED

Body language affects how others see us, but it may also change how we see ourselves. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy argues that “power posing” — standing in a posture of confidence, even when we don’t feel confident — can boost feelings of confidence, and might have an impact on our chances for success. (Note: Some of the findings presented in this talk have been referenced in an ongoing debate among social scientists about robustness and reproducibility.

Inside the debate about power posing: a Q & A with Amy Cuddy

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Credit: Tryfon Papadopoulos

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 you’re doing with your body.

So how many of you are sort of making yourself smaller?

Maybe you’re hunching, crossing your legs, maybe you’re wrapping your ankles.

Because we hold on to our arms like this, sometimes we spread out.

I see you.

So I want you to pay attention to what you’re doing right now.

We’re going to come back to that in a few minutes.

And I’m hoping that if you sort of learn to tweak this a little bit, it could significantly

change the way your life unfolds.

So we’re really fascinated with body language.

And we’re particularly interested in other people’s body language.

You know, we’re interested in, like, you know, an awkward interaction or a smile or

a contemptuous glance or maybe a very awkward wink.

Or maybe even something like a handshake.

Here they are arriving at number 10 and look at this, lucky policeman gets the shake hands

with the president of the United States.

Oh, here comes the prime minister of the, no.

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, it’s language.

So we think about communication.

When we think about communication, we think about interactions.

So what is your body language communicating to me?

What’s mine communicating to you?

And there’s 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 the effects of our body language

or other people’s 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 Ambadi, a researcher at Tufts University, shows that when people

watch 30-second soundless clips of real physician-patient interactions, their judgments of the physician’s

niceness predict whether or not that physician will be sued.

So it doesn’t have to do so much with whether or not that physician was incompetent, 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, let’s go digital, emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead you to

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 the other audience that’s influenced by our nonverbals, and that’s ourselves.

We are also influenced by our nonverbals, our thoughts and our feelings and our physiology.

So what nonverbals am I talking about?

I’m a social psychologist, I study prejudice, and I teach at a competitive business school.

So it was inevitable that I would become interested in 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, you’re basically opening

up.

It’s about opening up.

And this is true across the animal kingdom.

It’s not just limited to primates, and humans do the same thing.

So they do this both when they have power sort of chronically, and also when they’re

feeling powerful in the moment.

And this one is 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 competition.

So when they cross the finish line and they’ve won, it doesn’t matter if they’ve 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 small, we don’t 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 other’s nonverbals.

So if someone’s being really powerful with us, we tend to make ourselves smaller.

We don’t mirror them, we do the opposite of them.

So I’m 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, like really coming to 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, they’re sort of spread out, they raise their

hands like this.

You have other people who are virtually collapsing when they come in, as soon as they come 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 noticed a couple things about this.

One, you’re not going to be surprised, it seems to be related to gender.

So women are much 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 really

important in the MBA classroom, because participation counts for half the grade.

So business schools have been struggling with its 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 participation.

So I started to wonder, okay, so you have these people coming in like this and they’re

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, who’s at Berkeley, and I really wanted to know,

can you fake it till you make it?

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.

There’s a lot of evidence, but our question really was, do our nonverbals govern how we

think and feel about ourselves?

There’s some evidence that they do.

So for example, when we smile when we feel happy, but also when we’re 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 goes both ways.

So when you feel powerful, you’re more likely to do this, but it’s also possible that when

you pretend to be powerful, you are more likely to actually feel powerful.

So the second question really was, so 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 powerful, what am I talking about?

So I’m talking about thoughts and feelings and the sort of physiological things that

make up our thoughts and feelings, and in my case, that’s hormones.

I look at hormones.

So what do the minds of the powerful versus the powerless look like?

So powerful people tend to be not surprisingly more assertive and more confident, more optimistic.

They actually feel that they’re 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 more 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 hierarchies 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 react to stress.

So do you want the high-power leader that’s dominant, high on testosterone, but really

stress reactive?

Probably not.

You want the person who’s powerful and assertive and dominant, but not very stress reactive,

the person who’s laid back.

So we know that in primate hierarchies, if an individual needs to take over an alpha

role sort of suddenly, within a few days, that individual’s 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 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 it’s going to make you 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 I’m just going to show you five of the poses, although they took on only two.

So here’s one, a couple more.

This one has been dubbed the Wonder Woman by the media.

Here a couple more.

So you can be standing or you can be sitting.

And here are the low-power poses.

So you’re folding up, you’re making yourself small.

This one is very low-power.

When you’re touching your neck, you’re really kind of protecting yourself.

So this is what happens.

They come in, they spit into a vial.

For two minutes, say, you need to do this or this.

They don’t look at pictures of the poses, we don’t want to prime them with a concept

of power.

We don’t want them to be feeling power, right?

So two minutes they do this.

We then 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.

That’s it.

That’s the whole experiment.

So this is what we find.

Risk tolerance, which is the gambling.

What we find is that when you’re in the high-power pose condition, 86% of you will gamble.

When you’re in the low-power pose condition, only 60%.

And that’s a pretty whopping significant difference.

Here’s what we find on testosterone.

From their baseline when they come in, high-power people experience about a 20% increase.

And low-power people experience about a 10% decrease.

So again, two minutes and you get these changes.

Here’s what you get on cortisol.

High-power people experience about a 25% decrease.

And the low-power people experience about a 15% increase.

So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be

either assertive, confident, and comfortable or really stress-reactive and feeling sort

of shut down.

And we’ve all had that feeling, right?

So it seems that our nonverbals do govern how we think and feel about ourselves.

So it’s not just others, but it’s also ourselves.

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?

So this is in the lab.

It’s this little task.

It’s just a couple of minutes.

Where can you actually apply this, which we cared about, of course?

And so we think it’s really what matters, and where you want to use this, is evaluative

situations like social threat situations.

Where are you being evaluated, either by your friends, like for teenagers at the lunchroom

table?

It could be, for some people, speaking at a school board meeting.

It might be giving a pitch or giving a talk like this 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?

So we were, of course, horrified and said, oh, my God, no, no, no, that’s not what we

meant at all for numerous reasons, no, no, no, don’t do that.

Again, this is not about you talking to other people, it’s you talking to yourself.

What do you do before you go into a job interview?

You do this, right?

You’re sitting down, you’re looking at your iPhone or your Android, not trying to leave

anyone out.

You are, you know, you’re looking at your notes, you’re 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 that’s what we want to test, okay?

So we bring people into a lab, and they do either hire low-power posters again, they

go through a very stressful job interview.

It’s five minutes long, they are being recorded, they’re being judged also, and the judges

are trained to give no nonverbal feedback.

So they look like this, like imagine this is the person interviewing you.

So for five minutes, nothing, and this is worse than being heckled.

People hate this.

It’s what Marianne LeFrance 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 see what happened.

We then have these coders look at these tapes, four of them.

They’re blind to the hypothesis, they’re blind to the conditions, they have no idea who’s

been posing in what pose.

And they end up looking at these sets of tapes and they say, oh, we want to hire these people,

all the high-power posers, we don’t want to hire these people.

We also evaluate these people much more positively overall.

But what’s driving it?

It’s not about the content of the speech, it’s about the presence that they’re bringing

to the speech.

We also, because we rate them on all these variables related to sort of competence, like

how well structured is the speech, how good is it, what are their qualifications, no effect

on those things.

This is what’s affected, these kinds of things.

People are bringing their true selves basically, they’re bringing themselves, they bring their

ideas but as themselves, with no residue over them.

So this is what’s 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 behavior can change our outcomes, they say to me, it feels fake,

right?

So I said, fake it till you make it.

It’s not me.

I don’t want to get there and then still feel like a fraud.

I don’t want to feel like an imposter.

I don’t want to get there only to feel like I’m not supposed to be here.

And that really resonated with me because I want to tell you a little story about being

an imposter and feeling like I’m not supposed to be here.

When I was 19, I was in a really bad car accident, I was thrown out of a car, rolled several times,

I was thrown from the car and I woke up in a head injury rehab ward and I had been withdrawn

from college and I learned that my IQ had dropped by two standard deviations, which

was very traumatic.

I knew my IQ because I had identified with being smart and I had been called gifted as

a child.

So I’m taken out of college, I keep trying to go back, they say, you’re not going to

finish college.

Like just, you know, there are other things for you to do but that’s not going to work

out for you.

So I really struggled with this and I have to say, having your identity taken from you,

your core identity and for me it was being smart, having that taken from you, there’s

nothing that leaves you feeling more powerless than that.

So I felt entirely powerless, I worked and worked and worked and I got lucky and worked

and got lucky and worked.

Eventually I graduated from college, took me four years longer than my peers and I convinced

someone, my angel advisor, Susan Fisk, to take me on and so I ended up at Princeton and

I was like, I am not supposed to be here, I am an imposter.

And the night before my first year talking, the first year talk at Princeton is a 20 minute

talk to 20 people, that’s it.

I was so afraid of being found out the next day that I called her and said, I’m quitting.

She was like, you are not quitting because I took a gamble on you and you’re staying,

you’re going to stay and this is what you’re going to do, you’re going to fake it, you’re

going to take, you’re going to do every talk that you ever get asked to do, you’re just

going to do it and do it and do it even if you’re terrified and just paralyzed and having

an out of body experience and until you have this moment where you say, oh my gosh, I’m

doing it, I have become this, I am actually doing this, so that’s what I did, five years

in grad school, a few years, I’m at Northwestern, I moved to Harvard, I’m at Harvard, I’m not

really thinking about it anymore but for a long time I had been thinking, not supposed

to be here, not supposed to be here.

So the end of my first year at Harvard, a student who had not talked in class the entire

semester who I had said, look you got to participate or else you’re going to fail, came into my

office, I really didn’t know her at all and she said, she came in, totally defeated and

she said, I’m not supposed to be here and that was the moment for me because two things

happened, one was that I realized, oh my gosh, I don’t feel like that anymore, I don’t feel

that anymore but she does and I get that feeling and the second was, she is supposed to be

here, she can fake it, she can become it, so I was like, yes you are, you are supposed

to be here and tomorrow you’re going to fake it, you’re going to make yourself powerful

and you’re going to go into the classroom and you are going to give the best comment

ever and she gave the best comment ever and people turned around and they were like, oh

my god, I didn’t even notice her sitting there, she comes back to me months later and I realized

that she had not just faked it until she made it, she had actually faked it until she became

it, so she had changed and so I want to say to you, don’t fake it until you make it, fake

it until you become it, you know, it’s not, do it enough until you actually become it

and internalize, the last thing I want to leave you with is this, tiny tweaks can lead

to big changes, so this is two minutes, two minutes, two minutes, two minutes, before

you go into the next stressful, evaluative situation for two minutes, try doing this

in the elevator in a bathroom stall at your desk behind closed doors, that’s what you

want to do, configure your brain to cope the best in that situation, get your testosterone

up, get your cortisol down, don’t leave that situation feeling like, oh I didn’t show them

who I am, leave that situation feeling like, oh I really feel like I got to say who I am

and show who I am, so I want to ask you first, you know, both to try power posing and also

I want to ask you to share this science because this is simple, I don’t have ego involved

in this, give it away, like share it with people because the people who can use it the

most are the ones with no resources and no technology and no status and no power, give

it to them because they can do it in private, they need their bodies, privacy and two minutes

and it can significantly change the outcomes of their life, thank you.