About : standard furniture kantor
Title : standard furniture kantor
standard furniture kantor
translator: joseph genireviewer: morton bast so i want to start by offering youa free no-tech life hack, and all it requires of you is this: that you change your posturefor two minutes. but before i give it away,i want to ask you to right now do a little audit of your bodyand what you're doing with your body. so how many of you aresort of making yourselves smaller? maybe you're 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 attentionto what you're doing right now. we're going to come backto that in a few minutes, and i'm hoping that if you learnto tweak this a little bit, it could significantly changethe way your life unfolds. so, we're really fascinatedwith body language, and we're particularly interestedin other people's body language. you know, we're interested in,like, you know — (laughter) —
an awkward interaction, or a smile, or a contemptuous glance,or maybe a very awkward wink, or maybe even something like a handshake. narrator: here they arearriving at number 10. this lucky policeman gets to shake handswith the president of the united states. here comes the prime minister --no. (laughter) (applause) (laughter) (applause) amy cuddy: so a handshake,or the lack of a handshake, can have us talking for weeksand weeks and weeks.
even the bbc and the new york times. so obviously when we thinkabout nonverbal behavior, or body language -- but we call itnonverbals as social scientists -- it's language, so we thinkabout communication. when we think about communication,we think about interactions. so what is your body languagecommunicating to me? what's mine communicating to you? and there's a lot of reason to believethat this is a valid way to look at this. so social scientistshave spent a lot of time
looking at the effectsof our body language, or other people's body language,on judgments. and we make sweeping judgmentsand inferences from body language. and those judgments can predictreally meaningful life outcomes like who we hire or promote,who we ask out on a date. for example, nalini ambady,a researcher at tufts university, shows that when people watch30-second soundless clips of real physician-patient interactions, their judgmentsof the physician's niceness
predict whether or notthat physician will be sued. so it doesn't have to do so much with whether or not that physicianwas incompetent, but do we like that personand how they interacted? even more dramatic,alex todorov at princeton has shown us that judgmentsof political candidates' faces in just one second predict 70 percent of u.s. senate and gubernatorialrace outcomes, and even, let's go digital,
emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead you to claim more valuefrom 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 usand 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 nonverbals, our thoughts and our feelingsand our physiology.
so what nonverbals am i talking about? i'm a social psychologist.i study prejudice, and i teach at a competitivebusiness school, so it was inevitable that i would becomeinterested in power dynamics. i became especially interestedin nonverbal expressions of power and dominance. and what are nonverbal expressionsof 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 trueacross the animal kingdom. it's not just limited to primates. and humans do the same thing. (laughter) so they do this both when they havepower sort of chronically, and also when they're feelingpowerful in the moment. and this one is especially interestingbecause it really shows us
how universal and old theseexpressions of power are. this expression, which is known as pride, jessica tracy has studied. she shows that peoplewho are born with sight and people who are congenitallyblind do this when they win at a physical competition. so when they crossthe finish line and they've won, it doesn't matter if they've neverseen 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 bumpinto the person next to us. so again, both animals and humansdo the same thing. and this is what happenswhen you put together high and low power. so what we tend todo when it comes to power
is that we complementthe other's nonverbals. so if someone is beingreally 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 behaviorin the classroom, and what do i notice? i notice that mba students really exhibitthe full range of power nonverbals. so you have peoplewho are like caricatures of alphas, really coming into the room, they getright 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 peoplewho are virtually collapsing when they come in.as soon they come in, you see it. you see it on their facesand their bodies, and they sit in their chairand they make themselves tiny, and they go like thiswhen they raise their hand. i notice a couple of things about this.
one, you're not going to be surprised. it seems to be related to gender. so women are much more likelyto do this kind of thing than men. women feel chronicallyless powerful than men, so this is not surprising. but the other thing i noticed is that it also seemedto be related to the extent to which the students were participating,and how well they were participating. and this is really importantin the mba classroom,
because participationcounts for half the grade. so business schools have been strugglingwith this gender grade gap. you get these equally qualifiedwomen and men coming in and then you getthese differences in grades, and it seems to be partlyattributable to participation. so i started to wonder, you know, okay, so you have these people coming inlike this, and they're participating. is it possible that we couldget people to fake it and would it lead themto participate more?
so my main collaboratordana carney, who's at berkeley, and i really wanted to know,can you fake it till you make it? like, can you do thisjust for a little while and actually experiencea behavioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful? so we know that our nonverbalsgovern how other people think and feel about us.there's a lot of evidence. but our question really was, do our nonverbals governhow we think and feel about ourselves?
there's some evidence that they do. so, for example, we smilewhen we feel happy, but also, when we're forced to smile by holding a pen in our teethlike 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 possiblethat when you pretend to be powerful,
you are more likelyto actually feel powerful. so the second questionreally was, you know, so we know that our mindschange our bodies, but is it also truethat 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 thingsthat make up our thoughts and feelings, and in my case, that's hormones.i look at hormones.
so what do the minds of the powerfulversus the powerless look like? so powerful people tend to be,not surprisingly, more assertive and more confident,more optimistic. they actually feel they're going to wineven at games of chance. they also tend to be ableto think more abstractly. so there are a lot of differences.they take more risks. there are a lot of differencesbetween 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-poweralpha males in primate hierarchies have high testosterone and low cortisol, and powerful and effective leaders also have high testosteroneand low cortisol. so what does that mean?when you think about power, people tended to thinkonly about testosterone, because that was about dominance. but really, power is also abouthow you react to stress.
so do you want the high-powerleader that's dominant, high on testosterone,but really stress reactive? probably not, right? you want the person who's powerfuland assertive and dominant, but not very stress reactive,the person who's laid back. so we know that in primate hierarchies, if an alpha needs to take over, if an individual needs to take overan alpha role sort of suddenly, within a few days,that individual's testosterone has gone up
significantly and his cortisolhas 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 changescan shape the mind. so what happens, okay,you take a role change, what happens if you do thatat 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 feelmore powerful."
so this is what we did. we decided to bring people into the laband run a little experiment, and these people adopted, for two minutes, either high-power posesor low-power poses, and i'm just going to showyou five of the poses, although they took on only two. so here's one. a couple more. this one has been dubbedthe "wonder woman" by the media.
here are a couple more. so you can be standingor 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 protecting 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 don't look at pictures of the poses. we don't want to prime themwith a concept of power. we want them to be feeling power. so two minutes they do this. we then ask them, "how powerfuldo you feel?" on a series of items, and then we give theman 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, we find that when you arein the high-power pose condition, 86 percent of you will gamble. when you're in the low-powerpose condition, only 60 percent, and that'sa whopping significant difference. here's what we find on testosterone. from their baseline when they come in, high-power people experienceabout a 20-percent increase, and low-power people experienceabout a 10-percent decrease.
so again, two minutes,and you get these changes. here's what you get on cortisol. high-power people experienceabout a 25-percent decrease, and the low-power people experienceabout a 15-percent increase. so two minutes leadto 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 the feeling, right?
so it seems that our nonverbals do governhow 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 lifein meaningful ways? 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 where you want to use thisis evaluative situations, like social threat situations. where are you being evaluated,either by your friends? for teenagers,it's at the lunchroom table. for some people it's speakingat a school board meeting. it might be giving a pitchor giving a talk like this or doing a job interview. we decided that the onethat 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 infor the job interview, right? (laughter) you know, so we were of coursehorrified, and said, oh my god, no,that's not what we meant at all. for numerous reasons, no, don't do that. again, this is not about youtalking to other people.
it's you talking to yourself. what do you do before you gointo a job interview? you do this. you're sitting down.you're looking at your iphone -- or your android, not tryingto leave anyone out. you're looking at your notes, you're hunching up, making yourself small, when really what you shouldbe 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 high-or low-power poses again, they go througha very stressful job interview. it's five minutes long.they are being recorded. they're being judged also, and the judges are trainedto give no nonverbal feedback, so they look like this. imagine this is the personinterviewing you. so for five minutes, nothing,and this is worse than being heckled.
people hate this. it's what marianne lafrance calls"standing in social quicksand." so this really spikes your cortisol. so this is the job interviewwe put them through, because we really wantedto see what happened. we then have these coders lookat these tapes, four of them. they're blind to the hypothesis.they're blind to the conditions. they have no ideawho's been posing in what pose, and they end up lookingat these sets of tapes,
and they say,"we want to hire these people," all the high-power posers. "we don't want to hire these people. we also evaluate these peoplemuch more positively overall." but what's driving it? it's not about the content of the speech. it's about the presencethat they're bringing to the speech. because we rate themon all these variables related to 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 bringingtheir 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 mediating the effect. so when i tell people about this,
that our bodies change our mindsand our minds can change our behavior, and our behavior can changeour 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 thereand then still feel like a fraud. i don't want to feel like an impostor. i don't want to get there only to feellike i'm not supposed to be here. and that really resonated with me,
because i want to tell youa little story about being an impostor and feeling likei'm not supposed to be here. when i was 19, i wasin 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 droppedby two standard deviations, which was very traumatic.
i knew my iq becausei 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 goingto finish college. just, you know, there are otherthings for you to do, but that's not going to work out for you." so i really struggledwith this, and i have to say, having your identity takenfrom you, your core identity, and for me it was being smart,
having that taken from you, there's nothing that leaves you feelingmore powerless than that. so i felt entirely powerless. i worked and worked, and i got lucky, and worked, and got lucky, and worked. eventually i graduated from college. it took me four yearslonger than my peers, and i convinced someone,my angel advisor, susan fiske, 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 impostor. and the night before my first-year talk, and the first-year talk at princetonis a 20-minute talk to 20 people. that's it. i was so afraid of beingfound out the next day that i called herand said, "i'm quitting." she was like, "you are not quitting, because i took a gambleon you, and you're staying.
you're going to stay, and this iswhat you're going to do. you are going to fake it. you're going to do every talkthat you ever get asked to do. you're just going to do itand do it and do it, even if you're terrifiedand 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." so at the end of my first year at harvard, a student who had not talkedin class the entire semester, who i had said, "look, you've gottaparticipate or else you're going to fail," came into my office.i really didn't know her at all.
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! like, 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 yourselfpowerful, and, you know -- (applause) and you're going to gointo the classroom, and you are going to givethe best comment ever." you know? and she gavethe best comment ever, and people turned around and were like, oh my god, i didn't even notice hersitting there. (laughter)
she comes back to me months later, and i realized that she had not justfaked it till she made it, she had actually faked ittill she became it. so she had changed. and so i want to say to you,don't fake it till you make it. fake it till you become it. do it enough until you actuallybecome it and internalize. the last thing i'm goingto 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 stressfulevaluative situation, for two minutes, try doing this,in the elevator, in a bathroom stall, at your deskbehind closed doors. that's what you want to do. configure your brainto cope the best in that situation. get your testosterone up.get your cortisol down. don't leave that situation feelinglike, oh, i didn't show them who i am.
leave that situation feeling like, i really feel like i got to saywho 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 sharethe science, because this is simple. i don't have ego involved in this.(laughter) give it away. share it with people, because the people who can use it the most are the ones with no resourcesand no technology and no status and no power.
give it to thembecause they can do it in private. they need their bodies,privacy and two minutes, and it can significantly changethe outcomes of their life. thank you.