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Translator: Joseph Geni
Reviewer: Morton Bast
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So I want to start by offering you
a free no-tech life hack,
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and all it requires of you is this:
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that you change your posture
for two minutes.
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But before I give it away,
I want to ask you to right now
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do a little audit of your body
and what you're doing with your body.
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So how many of you are
sort of making yourselves smaller?
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Maybe you're hunching, crossing your legs,
maybe wrapping your ankles.
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Sometimes we hold onto our arms like this.
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Sometimes we spread out. (Laughter)
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I see you.
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So I want you to pay attention
to what you're doing right now.
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We're going to come back
to that in a few minutes,
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and I'm hoping that if you learn
to tweak this a little bit,
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it could significantly change
the way your life unfolds.
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So, we're really fascinated
with body language,
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and we're particularly interested
in other people's body language.
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You know, we're interested in,
like, you know — (Laughter) —
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an awkward interaction, or a smile,
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or a contemptuous glance,
or maybe a very awkward wink,
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or maybe even something like a handshake.
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Narrator: Here they are
arriving at Number 10.
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This lucky policeman gets to shake hands
with the President of the United States.
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Here comes the Prime Minister --
No. (Laughter) (Applause)
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(Laughter) (Applause)
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Amy Cuddy: So a handshake,
or the lack of a handshake,
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can have us talking for weeks
and weeks and weeks.
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Even the BBC and The New York Times.
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So obviously when we think
about nonverbal behavior,
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or body language -- but we call it
nonverbals as social scientists --
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it's language, so we think
about communication.
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When we think about communication,
we think about interactions.
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So what is your body language
communicating to me?
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What's mine communicating to you?
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And there's a lot of reason to believe
that this is a valid way to look at this.
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So social scientists
have spent a lot of time
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looking at the effects
of our body language,
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or other people's body language,
on judgments.
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And we make sweeping judgments
and inferences from body language.
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And those judgments can predict
really meaningful life outcomes
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like who we hire or promote,
who we ask out on a date.
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For example, Nalini Ambady,
a researcher at Tufts University,
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shows that when people watch
30-second soundless clips
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of real physician-patient interactions,
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their judgments
of the physician's niceness
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predict whether or not
that physician will be sued.
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So it doesn't have to do so much
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with whether or not that physician
was incompetent,
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but do we like that person
and how they interacted?
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Even more dramatic,
Alex Todorov at Princeton
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has shown us that judgments
of political candidates' faces
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in just one second predict 70 percent
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of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial
race outcomes,
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and even, let's go digital,
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emoticons used well in online negotiations
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can lead you to claim more value
from that negotiation.
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If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right?
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So when we think of nonverbals,
we think of how we judge others,
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how they judge us
and what the outcomes are.
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We tend to forget, though,
the other audience
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that's influenced by our nonverbals,
and that's ourselves.
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We are also influenced by our nonverbals,
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our thoughts and our feelings
and our physiology.
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So what nonverbals am I talking about?
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I'm a social psychologist.
I study prejudice,
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and I teach at a competitive
business school,
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so it was inevitable that I would become
interested in power dynamics.
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I became especially interested
in nonverbal expressions
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of power and dominance.
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And what are nonverbal expressions
of power and dominance?
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Well, this is what they are.
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So in the animal kingdom,
they are about expanding.
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So you make yourself big, you stretch out,
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you take up space,
you're basically opening up.
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It's about opening up.
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And this is true
across the animal kingdom.
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It's not just limited to primates.
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And humans do the same thing. (Laughter)
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So they do this both when they have
power sort of chronically,
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and also when they're feeling
powerful in the moment.
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And this one is especially interesting
because it really shows us
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how universal and old these
expressions of power are.
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This expression, which is known as pride,
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Jessica Tracy has studied.
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She shows that people
who are born with sight
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and people who are congenitally
blind do this
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when they win at a physical competition.
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So when they cross
the finish line and they've won,
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it doesn't matter if they've never
seen anyone do it.
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They do this.
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So the arms up in the V,
the chin is slightly lifted.
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What do we do when we feel powerless?
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We do exactly the opposite.
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We close up.
We wrap ourselves up.
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We make ourselves small.
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We don't want to bump
into the person next to us.
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So again, both animals and humans
do the same thing.
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And this is what happens
when you put together high and low power.
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So what we tend to
do when it comes to power
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is that we complement
the other's nonverbals.
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So if someone is being
really powerful with us,
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we tend to make ourselves smaller.
We don't mirror them.
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We do the opposite of them.
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So I'm watching this behavior
in the classroom,
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and what do I notice?
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I notice that MBA students really exhibit
the full range of power nonverbals.
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So you have people
who are like caricatures of alphas,
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really coming into the room, they get
right into the middle of the room
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before class even starts,
like they really want to occupy space.
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When they sit down,
they're sort of spread out.
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They raise their hands like this.
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You have other people
who are virtually collapsing
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when they come in.
As soon they come in, you see it.
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You see it on their faces
and their bodies,
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and they sit in their chair
and they make themselves tiny,
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and they go like this
when they raise their hand.
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I notice a couple of things about this.
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One, you're not going to be surprised.
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It seems to be related to gender.
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So women are much more likely
to do this kind of thing than men.
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Women feel chronically
less powerful than men,
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so this is not surprising.
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But the other thing I noticed
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is that it also seemed
to be related to the extent
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to which the students were participating,
and how well they were participating.
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And this is really important
in the MBA classroom,
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because participation
counts for half the grade.
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So business schools have been struggling
with this gender grade gap.
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You get these equally qualified
women and men coming in
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and then you get
these differences in grades,
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and it seems to be partly
attributable to participation.
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So I started to wonder, you know, okay,
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so you have these people coming in
like this, and they're participating.
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Is it possible that we could
get people to fake it
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and would it lead them
to participate more?
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So my main collaborator
Dana Carney, who's at Berkeley,
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and I really wanted to know,
can you fake it till you make it?
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Like, can you do this
just for a little while
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and actually experience
a behavioral outcome
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that makes you seem more powerful?
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So we know that our nonverbals
govern how other people
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think and feel about us.
There's a lot of evidence.
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But our question really was,
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do our nonverbals govern
how we think and feel about ourselves?
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There's some evidence that they do.
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So, for example, we smile
when we feel happy,
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but also, when we're forced to smile
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by holding a pen in our teeth
like this, it makes us feel happy.
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So it goes both ways.
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When it comes to power,
it also goes both ways.
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So when you feel powerful,
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you're more likely to do this,
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but it's also possible
that when you pretend to be powerful,
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you are more likely
to actually feel powerful.
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So the second question
really was, you know,
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so we know that our minds
change our bodies,
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but is it also true
that our bodies change our minds?
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And when I say minds,
in the case of the powerful,
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what am I talking about?
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So I'm talking about thoughts and feelings
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and the sort of physiological things
that make up our thoughts and feelings,
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and in my case, that's hormones.
I look at hormones.
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So what do the minds of the powerful
versus the powerless look like?
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So powerful people tend to be,
not surprisingly,
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more assertive and more confident,
more optimistic.
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They actually feel they're going to win
even at games of chance.
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They also tend to be able
to think more abstractly.
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So there are a lot of differences.
They take more risks.
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There are a lot of differences
between powerful and powerless people.
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Physiologically,
there also are differences
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on two key hormones: testosterone,
which is the dominance hormone,
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and cortisol, which is the stress hormone.
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So what we find is that high-power
alpha males in primate hierarchies
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have high testosterone and low cortisol,
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and powerful and effective leaders
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also have high testosterone
and low cortisol.
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So what does that mean?
When you think about power,
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people tended to think
only about testosterone,
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because that was about dominance.
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But really, power is also about
how you react to stress.
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So do you want the high-power
leader that's dominant,
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high on testosterone,
but really stress reactive?
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Probably not, right?
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You want the person who's powerful
and assertive and dominant,
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but not very stress reactive,
the person who's laid back.
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So we know that in primate hierarchies,
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if an alpha needs to take over,
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if an individual needs to take over
an alpha role sort of suddenly,
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within a few days,
that individual's testosterone has gone up
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significantly and his cortisol
has dropped significantly.
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So we have this evidence,
both that the body can shape
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the mind, at least at the facial level,
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and also that role changes
can shape the mind.
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So what happens, okay,
you take a role change,
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what happens if you do that
at a really minimal level,
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like this tiny manipulation,
this tiny intervention?
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"For two minutes," you say,
"I want you to stand like this,
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and it's going to make you feel
more powerful."
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So this is what we did.
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We decided to bring people into the lab
and run a little experiment,
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and these people adopted, for two minutes,
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either high-power poses
or low-power poses,
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and I'm just going to show
you five of the poses,
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although they took on only two.
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So here's one.
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A couple more.
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This one has been dubbed
the "Wonder Woman" by the media.
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Here are a couple more.
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So you can be standing
or you can be sitting.
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And here are the low-power poses.
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So you're folding up,
you're making yourself small.
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This one is very low-power.
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When you're touching your neck,
you're really protecting yourself.
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So this is what happens.
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They come in, they spit into a vial,
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for two minutes, we say,
"You need to do this or this."
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They don't look at pictures of the poses.
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We don't want to prime them
with a concept of power.
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We want them to be feeling power.
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So two minutes they do this.
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We then ask them, "How powerful
do you feel?" on a series of items,
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and then we give them
an opportunity to gamble,
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and then we take another saliva sample.
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That's it. That's the whole experiment.
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So this is what we find.
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Risk tolerance, which is the gambling,
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we find that when you are
in the high-power pose condition,
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86 percent of you will gamble.
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When you're in the low-power
pose condition,
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only 60 percent, and that's
a whopping significant difference.
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Here's what we find on testosterone.
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From their baseline when they come in,
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high-power people experience
about a 20-percent increase,
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and low-power people experience
about a 10-percent decrease.
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So again, two minutes,
and you get these changes.
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Here's what you get on cortisol.
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High-power people experience
about a 25-percent decrease,
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and the low-power people experience
about a 15-percent increase.
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So two minutes lead
to these hormonal changes
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that configure your brain
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to basically be either assertive,
confident and comfortable,
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or really stress-reactive,
and feeling sort of shut down.
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And we've all had the feeling, right?
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So it seems that our nonverbals do govern
how we think and feel about ourselves,
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so it's not just others,
but it's also ourselves.
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Also, our bodies change our minds.
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But the next question, of course,
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is, can power posing for a few minutes
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really change your life
in meaningful ways?
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This is in the lab, it's this little task,
it's just a couple of minutes.
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Where can you actually apply this?
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Which we cared about, of course.
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And so we think where you want to use this
is evaluative situations,
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like social threat situations.
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Where are you being evaluated,
either by your friends?
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For teenagers,
it's at the lunchroom table.
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For some people it's speaking
at a school board meeting.
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It might be giving a pitch
or giving a talk like this
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or doing a job interview.
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We decided that the one
that most people could relate to
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because most people had been through,
was the job interview.
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So we published these findings,
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and the media are all over it,
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and they say, Okay, so this is what you do
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when you go in
for the job interview, right?
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(Laughter)
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You know, so we were of course
horrified, and said,
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Oh my God, no,
that's not what we meant at all.
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For numerous reasons, no, don't do that.
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Again, this is not about you
talking to other people.
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It's you talking to yourself.
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What do you do before you go
into a job interview? You do this.
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You're sitting down.
You're looking at your iPhone --
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or your Android, not trying
to leave anyone out.
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You're looking at your notes,
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you're hunching up, making yourself small,
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when really what you should
be doing maybe is this,
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like, in the bathroom, right?
Do that. Find two minutes.
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So that's what we want to test. Okay?
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So we bring people into a lab,
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and they do either high-
or low-power poses again,
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they go through
a very stressful job interview.
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It's five minutes long.
They are being recorded.
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They're being judged also,
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and the judges are trained
to give no nonverbal feedback,
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so they look like this.
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Imagine this is the person
interviewing you.
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So for five minutes, nothing,
and this is worse than being heckled.
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People hate this.
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It's what Marianne LaFrance calls
"standing in social quicksand."
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So this really spikes your cortisol.
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So this is the job interview
we put them through,
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because we really wanted
to see what happened.
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We then have these coders look
at these tapes, four of them.
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They're blind to the hypothesis.
They're blind to the conditions.
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They have no idea
who's been posing in what pose,
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and they end up looking
at these sets of tapes,
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and they say,
"We want to hire these people,"
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all the high-power posers.
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"We don't want to hire these people.
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We also evaluate these people
much more positively overall."
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But what's driving it?
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It's not about the content of the speech.
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It's about the presence
that they're bringing to the speech.
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Because we rate them
on all these variables
00:15:16
related to competence,
like, how well-structured is the speech?
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How good is it?
What are their qualifications?
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No effect on those things.
This is what's affected.
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These kinds of things.
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People are bringing
their true selves, basically.
00:15:28
They're bringing themselves.
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They bring their ideas, but as themselves,
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with no, you know, residue over them.
00:15:34
So this is what's driving the effect,
or mediating the effect.
00:15:39
So when I tell people about this,
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that our bodies change our minds
and our minds can change our behavior,
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and our behavior can change
our outcomes, they say to me,
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"It feels fake." Right?
00:15:50
So I said, fake it till you make it.
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It's not me.
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I don't want to get there
and then still feel like a fraud.
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I don't want to feel like an impostor.
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I don't want to get there only to feel
like I'm not supposed to be here.
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And that really resonated with me,
00:16:05
because I want to tell you
a little story about being an impostor
00:16:08
and feeling like
I'm not supposed to be here.
00:16:11
When I was 19, I was
in a really bad car accident.
00:16:14
I was thrown out of a car,
rolled several times.
00:16:17
I was thrown from the car.
00:16:19
And I woke up in a head injury rehab ward,
00:16:22
and I had been withdrawn from college,
00:16:24
and I learned that my IQ had dropped
by two standard deviations,
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which was very traumatic.
00:16:32
I knew my IQ because
I had identified with being smart,
00:16:35
and I had been called gifted as a child.
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So I'm taken out of college,
I keep trying to go back.
00:16:41
They say, "You're not going
to finish college.
00:16:43
Just, you know, there are other
things for you to do,
00:16:45
but that's not going to work out for you."
00:16:47
So I really struggled
with this, and I have to say,
00:16:51
having your identity taken
from you, your core identity,
00:16:54
and for me it was being smart,
00:16:56
having that taken from you,
00:16:57
there's nothing that leaves you feeling
more powerless than that.
00:17:00
So I felt entirely powerless.
00:17:02
I worked and worked, and I got lucky,
00:17:04
and worked, and got lucky, and worked.
00:17:06
Eventually I graduated from college.
00:17:08
It took me four years
longer than my peers,
00:17:10
and I convinced someone,
my angel advisor, Susan Fiske,
00:17:15
to take me on,
and so I ended up at Princeton,
00:17:17
and I was like,
I am not supposed to be here.
00:17:20
I am an impostor.
00:17:22
And the night before my first-year talk,
00:17:24
and the first-year talk at Princeton
is a 20-minute talk to 20 people.
00:17:27
That's it.
00:17:28
I was so afraid of being
found out the next day
00:17:31
that I called her
and said, "I'm quitting."
00:17:34
She was like, "You are not quitting,
00:17:35
because I took a gamble
on you, and you're staying.
00:17:38
You're going to stay, and this is
what you're going to do.
00:17:41
You are going to fake it.
00:17:42
You're going to do every talk
that you ever get asked to do.
00:17:45
You're just going to do it
and do it and do it,
00:17:48
even if you're terrified
and just paralyzed
00:17:50
and having an out-of-body experience,
00:17:52
until you have this moment where you say,
'Oh my gosh, I'm doing it.
00:17:56
Like, I have become this.
I am actually doing this.'"
00:17:59
So that's what I did.
00:18:00
Five years in grad school,
00:18:01
a few years, you know,
I'm at Northwestern,
00:18:03
I moved to Harvard, I'm at Harvard,
00:18:05
I'm not really thinking about it anymore,
but for a long time I had been thinking,
00:18:09
"Not supposed to be here."
00:18:11
So at the end of my first year at Harvard,
00:18:14
a student who had not talked
in class the entire semester,
00:18:18
who I had said, "Look, you've gotta
participate or else you're going to fail,"
00:18:22
came into my office.
I really didn't know her at all.
00:18:25
She came in totally defeated,
and she said,
00:18:28
"I'm not supposed to be here."
00:18:35
And that was the moment for me.
00:18:37
Because two things happened.
00:18:38
One was that I realized,
00:18:40
oh my gosh,
I don't feel like that anymore.
00:18:43
I don't feel that anymore,
but she does, and I get that feeling.
00:18:46
And the second was,
she is supposed to be here!
00:18:48
Like, she can fake it, she can become it.
00:18:50
So I was like, "Yes, you are!
You are supposed to be here!
00:18:54
And tomorrow you're going to fake it,
00:18:56
you're going to make yourself
powerful, and, you know --
00:18:58
(Applause)
00:19:04
And you're going to go
into the classroom,
00:19:08
and you are going to give
the best comment ever."
00:19:10
You know? And she gave
the best comment ever,
00:19:13
and people turned around and were like,
00:19:15
oh my God, I didn't even notice her
sitting there. (Laughter)
00:19:18
She comes back to me months later,
00:19:20
and I realized that she had not just
faked it till she made it,
00:19:23
she had actually faked it
till she became it.
00:19:25
So she had changed.
00:19:27
And so I want to say to you,
don't fake it till you make it.
00:19:31
Fake it till you become it.
00:19:34
Do it enough until you actually
become it and internalize.
00:19:38
The last thing I'm going
to leave you with is this.
00:19:40
Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes.
00:19:45
So, this is two minutes.
00:19:47
Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes.
00:19:49
Before you go into the next stressful
evaluative situation,
00:19:52
for two minutes, try doing this,
in the elevator,
00:19:55
in a bathroom stall, at your desk
behind closed doors.
00:19:58
That's what you want to do.
00:20:00
Configure your brain
to cope the best in that situation.
00:20:03
Get your testosterone up.
Get your cortisol down.
00:20:05
Don't leave that situation feeling
like, oh, I didn't show them who I am.
00:20:09
Leave that situation feeling like,
00:20:11
I really feel like I got to say
who I am and show who I am.
00:20:14
So I want to ask you first, you know,
both to try power posing,
00:20:20
and also I want to ask you to share
the science, because this is simple.
00:20:25
I don't have ego involved in this.
(Laughter)
00:20:27
Give it away. Share it with people,
00:20:29
because the people who can use it the most
00:20:31
are the ones with no resources
and no technology
00:20:35
and no status and no power.
00:20:37
Give it to them
because they can do it in private.
00:20:40
They need their bodies,
privacy and two minutes,
00:20:42
and it can significantly change
the outcomes of their life.
00:20:45
Thank you.
00:20:46
(Applause)
