Your body language may shape who you are

TED Talks - Most Popular

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 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 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 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 — (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 are

arriving at Number 10.

This lucky policeman gets to shake hands

with 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 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 Ambady,

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, 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 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. (Laughter)

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 is 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,

really coming 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 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 of 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 this 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, 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 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, 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, you know,

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 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, 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 primate hierarchies,

if an alpha needs to take over,

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 are 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 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 them

with a concept of power.

We want them to be feeling power.

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,

we find that when you are

in the high-power pose condition,

86 percent of you will gamble.

When you're in the low-power

pose condition,

only 60 percent, and that's

a whopping significant difference.

Here's what we find on testosterone.

From their baseline when they come in,

high-power people experience

about a 20-percent increase,

and low-power people experience

about a 10-percent decrease.

So again, two minutes,

and you get these changes.

Here's what you get on cortisol.

High-power people experience

about a 25-percent decrease,

and the low-power people experience

about a 15-percent 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 the 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?

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 this

is 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 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?

(Laughter)

You know, so we were of course

horrified, 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 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.

You're sitting down.

You're looking at your iPhone --

or your Android, not trying

to leave anyone out.

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 high-

or 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.

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 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 end up looking

at 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 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.

Because we rate them

on 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 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 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 impostor.

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 impostor

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.

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 I got lucky,

and worked, and got lucky, and worked.

Eventually I graduated from college.

It took me four years

longer 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 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 are going to fake it.

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,

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 talked

in class the entire semester,

who I had said, "Look, you've gotta

participate 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 yourself

powerful, and, you know --

(Applause)

And you're going to go

into the classroom,

and you are going to give

the best comment ever."

You know? And she gave

the best comment ever,

and people turned around and were like,

oh my God, I didn't even notice her

sitting there. (Laughter)

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.

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 actually

become it and internalize.

The last thing I'm going

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,

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

the 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 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.

(Applause)