Your body language shapes who you are - Amy Cuddy

[Music] [Music] [Applause] so i want to start by um offering you a free no tech life hack um 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 um crossing your legs maybe wrapping your ankles sometimes 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 um 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 um a uh uh 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 uh look at this lucky policeman gets to shake hands with the president of the united states on here comes the prime minister of it now so um a handshake or the lack of a handshake can have us talking for weeks and weeks and weeks even the bbc in the new york times so 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 be to believe that this is this is a valid way to look at this so social scientists have spent a lot of time looking at the effects of 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 um who we ask out on the date for example uh nalani ambadi a researcher

at tufts university shows that when people watch 30 minute a 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 um 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 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 that's influenced by our nonverbals and that's ourselves we are also influenced by our non-verbals 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 non-verbal 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 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 others non-verbals 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 nonverbal so you have people who are like caricatures of alphas like really come 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 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 notice 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 a 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 and grades and it seems to be partly attributable to participation so i started to wonder you know 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 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 non-verbals govern how other people think and feel about us there's a lot of evidence but our question really was do our non-verbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves there's some evidence that they do so for example um when we 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 um it also goes both ways so when you when you uh feel powerful you're more likely to do this but it's also possible that um when you 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 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 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 our differences on two key hormones testosterone which is the dominance hormone and cortisol which is the stress hormone so what we find is that um a high power alpha males and 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 10 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 right 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 in private hierarchies if an alpha needs to take over uh 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 on 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 we 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 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 not when the when you're in the

high power pose condition 86 of you will gamble when you're in the low power post 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-powered 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 you know 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 you know it's just a couple of minutes you know where can

you actually apply this which we cared about of course and so we think it's really what what what matters i mean 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 you know 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 um we published these these findings and the media are all over and they say um okay so this is what you do when you go in for the job interview right you know 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 um you are you know you're looking at your notes you're hunting 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 a cup they do either higher low power poses 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 it's 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 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 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 you know residue over them so this is what's driving the effect or media mediating the effect so um 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 i don't it feels fake right so i said fake it till you make it like i don't it's not me like

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 um 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 gonna finish college like just you know there's there are other things for you to do but that's not gonna 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 if 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 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 gonna do it and

do it and do it even if you're terrified and just paralyzed and having an out-of-body experience until you have this moment where you say oh my gosh i'm doing it like i have become this i am actually doing this so that's what i did five years in grad school a few years you know 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 at the end of my first year

at harvard a student who had not talked in class the entire semester who had said look you've 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 you know i don't feel that anymore but she does and i get that feeling and the second was she

is supposed to be here like she can fake it she can become it so he's like yes you are you are supposed to be here and tomorrow you're gonna fake it you're gonna make yourself powerful and you know you're gonna and you're gonna go you're gonna go into the classroom and you are gonna give the best comment ever you know and she gave the best comment ever and people turned around they were like oh my god i didn't even notice her sitting there you know she comes back to me months later and i realized that

she had not just faked it till she made it she had actually faked it till she became it so she had changed um and so i i i want to say to you don't fake it till you make it fake it till 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 get configure your brain to cope the best in that situation get your testosterone up get your quarters all down don't leave that situation feeling like oh i didn't show them who i am leave that situation feeling like 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 [Music] you