Your Body Language Shapes Who Yo

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 游说 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 ['prɛzns] that they're bringing to the speech. Because we rate them on all these variables ['vɛrɪəbl] related to competence ['kɑmpɪtəns], like, how well-structured is the speech? How good is it? What are their qualifications? No effect [ɪ'fɛkt] 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 ['rɛzɪdu] over them. So this is what's driving the effect, or mediating ['midɪet] the effect.