Are you interested in how body language affects how we are perceived by others as well as how we perceive ourselves? Then perhaps you already know the popular social psychologist Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School and her TED talk entitled Your body language shapes who you are. Cuddy's presentation from 2012 has already had more than 16 million hits on the Internet, which makes it one of the top five most successful TED talks of all time. In her speech, Amy Cuddy presents her concept called "power posing".
"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," says Cuddy at the beginning of her speech. In the animal kingdom, it is evident that power positions include stretching and opening-up. Expressions of powerlessness, on the contrary, include closing-down or making oneself smaller. It is the same with human beings.
"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?." We know that our mind can change our body, but can the body change the mind too? Yes, it can.
Experiment in the lab
Amy Cuddy organized an experiment which asked the participants to take positions that indicate high or low power for two minutes before their saliva samples were taken. Then they answered the question about whether they felt powerful in combination with various objects and were offered an opportunity to gamble. After that their saliva samples were taken again. The experiment clearly showed that two minutes are enough to make hormonal changes that set a person's brain to feel either assertive, confident, and relaxed, or stressed out and depressed.
The same principle seems to even works in job interviews and other demanding meetings. What kind of body posture should you take before going for an interview or an important assessment? How can you increase the level of testosterone and decrease the level of stress hormone cortisol in your brain? All this can be found on http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are.
-kk-