How you position yourself in space says a lot
Don't call it a hunch. Posture really does pay off.
Harvard and Columbia business professors confirmed this much in the October issue of Psychology Today, finding that striking certain poses for as little as two minutes can stimulate hormonal changes within the body and leave someone feeling more confident and powerful.
"We want to show that a very tiny change can make people feel much more powerful," says Dr. Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist who coauthored the study "Power Posing" with Columbia University's Dana Carney and graduate student Andy J. Yap.
These power positions — like putting your palms down on a table while standing, reclining in a chair with your hands behind your head and your feet on the table, and stretching your arms out wide — won't make you the next Donald Trump.
But they can foster a frisson of fortitude in which the poser experiences a spike in testosterone and lower levels of cortisol, creating an optimal hormonal balance that leads to a sense of more power and a desire to take risks.
"You don't need to get the corner office," says Cuddy, a social psychologist who teaches a "Power and Influence" class at Harvard Business School. "Changing your body language and your posture will create physiological changes that optimally configure your brain to deal with stressful situations."
The science behind success has evolutionary findings, she says.
"The poses that we used in the experiment are strongly associated across the animal kingdom," Cuddy says. "Either you want to be big because you're in control or you want to close in and be small because you're not."
The idea of drawing a sense of power and confidence through posing is akin to experiencing a sense of calmness in certain relaxation exercises such as yoga or the runner's high after a jog, she said.
Dr. Brett Wartenberg, owner of Main Street Chiropractic in Medford, said this concept has been practiced for eons in the discipline of yoga.
"Yoga creates a sense of well-being and if that (happens because there's) a hormonal effect, then the research is verifying what practitioners have known for thousands of years," Warterberg says.
Cuddy and Carney got the idea to explore the effect of posturing after noticing a commonality among female students who took their MBA classes. Though class participation accounted for as much as 50 percent of their final grade, many students went silent, exhibiting the low-power poses among animals.
Group experiment
They devised this experiment: 42 male and female participants randomly were assigned to a high- or low-power pose group. Instead of being briefed on the hypothesis, each participant believed it was related to the placement of ECG electrodes above and below his or her heart.
After each participant assumed either a high- or low-power pose for two minutes, each one was then given $2 and the option of rolling dice for even odds of winning $4. They found that 86 percent of the high-power pose group rolled the dice, while only 60 percent of the low-power pose did.
"That's because power is associated with risk-taking," she says.
Using saliva samples taken before and after the exercise, Cuddy and her coauthors discovered that high-power poses decreased cortisol amounts by about 25 percent and increased testosterone amounts by about 19 percent for both men and women. In contrast, low-power poses increased cortisol about 17 percent and decreased testosterone about 10 percent.
When struck, the poses are plain to see and what better place to analyze them than in the television workplace visited by millions of Americans each week?
The study finds that Michael and Jim from "The Office" often exhibit power poses such as open stances while Pam and Phyllis are more inclined to strike such low-power poses as slumping and bringing their hands inward.
Inside all of us
To go from the timidity of Pam to the wicked self assuredness of Jim isn't quite the stretch.
Inner confidence lies inside all of us and just needs to be dredged up, Cuddy says. In the animal kingdom, a pushover who changes roles also will experience changes in their testosterone level — the dominance hormone — and their cortisone levels — the hormone causing stress. Good leadership is related to both these hormones, Cuddy says.
"If an (omega) takes over a higher position, maybe because the alpha dies, its testosterone rises and its cortisone drops within a few days," Cuddy says. "And if you're pushed down in the hierarchy, your testosterone drops and your cortisone rises."
Cuddy previously has shown you can make it by faking it.
Cuddy, who obtained her doctorate in psychology at Princeton, conducted a study in which the participants were forced to chomp down on a pencil and smile until the muscles around the eye contracted.
"If they do that for a few minutes, they feel much happier after they're done it," she says.
The holiday season, however, poses many problems, testing your patience and your posture, Wartenburg says.
"People will typically slow down and stop their exercise programs this time of year," says Wartenberg, who was named the Chiropractor of the Year by the Association of New Jersey Chiropractors. "Now they're extra busy carrying gifts and raking "leaves . . . and if the body is not in proper balance in utilizing those exercises it could lead to breakdown."
Pick your pose
Just as some poses, including classic yoga postures, are empowering, others have the opposite effect and should be avoided at all costs during important interactions.
Classic low-power positions include pointing one's elbows toward the body with folded hands, standing with arms and legs crossed in a meek manner and touching one's neck, Cuddy says.
These poses serve practical purposes for those who may feel powerless or lack confidence, Cuddy says.
If you fret an upcoming job interview or presentation, holding one's body in "high-power" poses for short time periods can summon an extra surge of power and sense of well-being when it's needed, Cuddy says.
"We are not suggesting people walk into an interview and put their feet on the desks," Cuddy says. "What we're saying is you spend a couple minutes in these high-power poses before you enter that interview. Go into the bathroom if you have to and make yourself big. Stand on your toes, widen your arms and do it before you walk in."Defies the norm While simple, this behavior defies the normal instincts many feel before walking into a job interview — to sit, hover over their notes and "become tiny," Cuddy says."We're not saying stand up and dominate everyone. We're saying get your brain to feel powerful so you can deal with the situations."
Some of her students worried that knowing the purpose of these exercises might undermine their effectiveness, Cubby says.
"We tell people who know the hypothesis and we still get the effect," she says.
Its effects dwarf all other power manipulations, she says. For instance, one empowering exercise has a person write about an instance when he or she felt powerful.
"Our power poses outperform that kind of manipulation," she says.
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