Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are | Amy Cuddy | TED

so I want to start by um offering you a free

no Tech life hack

um 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

um crossing your legs maybe wrapping your ankles

sometimes we hold on to our arms like this

uh sometimes we uh spread

out I see you

um 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 sort of learn to tweak this a little

bit it could significantly

change the way your life

unfolds um 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

um a uh uh an awkward interaction

or a smile or a contemptuous

glance or maybe a a very awkward

wink um or maybe even something like a

handshake here they are arriving at number 10 and uh look at this lucky

policeman gets to shake hands with the president of the United States

oh and here comes the prime minister of it

no so um 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 so obviously when we think about

non-verbal 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 to believe that this is this is a valid way to look at

this so social scientists have spent a lot of time

looking at the effects of

of our body language or other people's body language on judgments

and we make sweeping

judgments and an in inferences

from body language and those judgments

can predict really meaningful

life outcomes like who we hire or promote

um who we ask out on a date

for example uh Nalan OT a researcher at TS University shows that

when people watch 30 minute

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

um even more dramatic

Alex todorov at Princeton has shown us that

um judgments of political candidates

faces in just 1 second

predict 70% of US 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

so when we think of nonverbals

we think of how we judge others how they judge us and what the

outcome 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 studi 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 non-verbal expressions of power and dominance

um and what are non-verbal

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 so they do this both when they when they have power sort of

chronically and also when they're feeling power ful 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

uh 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 others nonverbals so if someone's 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 um what do I notice

I notice that uh

MBA students really exhibit the full range of power nonverbal

so you have people who are like caricatures

of Alphas like 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 um when they sit down they're sort of spread out they raise their

hands like this um

you have other people who are virtually

collapsing when they come in as soon soon as 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 they go like this when they raise their

hand I noticed a couple things about this one you're not going to be

surprised it seems to be related to

gender so um women are much more likely to do this kind of thing

than men um women feel chronically

less powerful than men so this is not

surprising um 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 um when we 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

um it also goes both ways

so when you when you uh feel powerful you're more likely to do this

but it's also possible

that um when you when you

uh 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 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 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

uh more more optimistic

they actually feel that they're going to win even at games of chance

uh 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

Testo testosterone which is the dominance

hormone and C cortisol which is the stress

hormone so what we find is that

um uh 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 T 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 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 uh in in primate

hierarchies if an alpha

needs to take over

uh 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 it's c has dropped significantly

so we have this evidence

both that the body can shape the mind at least at the facial

level um and also

that role changes can shape the mind

so what happens okay you take a role

change um 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 uh 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 one couple more

this one has been dubbed the Wonder Woman

by the media here a couple more

so you can be standing or you can be sitting

uh 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 kind of protecting

yourself so this is what happens

they come in they spit into a vial

we for two minutes 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 right 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

what we find is that when you're when the when you're in the high

power pose condition 86%

of you will gamble

when you're in the low power pose condition only 60%

and that's a pretty whopping significant

difference here's what we find on

testosterone from their Baseline when they come in

high power people experience about a 20%

increase and low power people

experience about a 10%

decrease so again 2 minutes and you get these changes

here's what you get on cortisol

high power people experience about a 25%

decrease and the low power people experience

about a 15% 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

um and you know feeling sort of shut down and we've all had that

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 so this is in the lab it's this little task

you know it's just a couple of minutes

you know where can you actually apply this which we cared about of course

and so we think

it's really what what what matters

I mean where you want to use this is evaluative

situations like social threat

situations where are you being evaluated

either by your friends like for

teenagers at the lunchroom

table it could be you know for some people it's speaking

at a Schoolboard meeting it might be giving a pitch

or giving a talk like this or

um 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 um we published these these findings

and the media all over it and they say um

okay so this is what you do when you go in for the job

right you know so we were of course horrified

and it said oh my God no no no that's not what we meant

at all for a numerous reasons no no 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 right you're sitting down you're looking at your iPhone

or your Android not trying to leave anyone out

um you are you know you're looking at your notes you're hunching up making

yourself small when really what you should doing maybe is this like in the

bathroom right do that fine two minutes so that's what we want to test

okay so we bring people

into a lab and they do a couple 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 non-verbal

feedback so they look like this like imagine this is the person interviewing

you so for five minutes nothing nothing

and this is worse than being

heckled people hate this it's it's what Maran the France 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 they they end up

looking at these sets of tapes and they say oh 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 we also because we rate them in all

these variables related to sort of 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 breaking their true selves basically they're bringing themselves

they bring their ideas but as themselves

with with no you know residue

over them so this is what's driving the effect or mediate

mediating the effect so

um 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

I don't it feels fake

right so I said fake it till you make it like I don't

it's not me like I don't want to get there

and then still feel like a fraud I don't want to feel like an

impos fer 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 um I woke up in a head injury rehab Ward

and I had been withdrawn from college

um and I learned

that my IQ had dropped by by two standard

deviations which was um

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 like just you know

there there other things for you to do but that's not going to work

out for you so

I I really struggled with this and I have to say having your identity

taken from you your core identity and if 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 worked and I got lucky and worked and got

lucky and worked eventually I graduated from college

took me four years longer than my peers

and I convinced someone my

my angel uh adviser

Susan Fisk 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 going to fake it

you're going to take 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 5 years in

grad school 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

not supposed to be here

so at the end of my first year at

Harvard um a student who had not talked in class the entire semester who

I had said look you got to participate or else you're going to fail

came into my office I really didn't know her at all

and she said 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

you know 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 he's 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 GNA and

you're G to go 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 they

were like oh my god I didn't even notice her sitting there you know

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

um and so I I

I I want to say to you don't fake it till you make it

fake it till you become it

you know it's not do it enough until you actually become it and internalize

the last thing I want 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 2 minutes try doing this in the elevator

in a bathroom stall

at your desk behind closed doors

that's what you want to do get 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 oh 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 this science

cuz this is simple

I don't have ego involved in this

give it away like 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