Your Body Language Shapes Who Yo

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['praɪmet]. And humans do the same thing. (Laughter) So they do this both when they have power sort of chronically ['krɑnɪkli], 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 [kən'dʒɛnətəli] 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 [tʃɪn] 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 [bʌmp] 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 [ɪɡ'zɪbɪt] the full range of power nonverbals. So you have people who are like caricatures ['kærɪkətʃɚ] 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 ['ɑkjupaɪ] space. When they sit down, they're sort of spread out. They raise their hands like this. You have other people who are virtually ['vɝtʃʊəli] collapsing [kə'læps] 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 [ɪk'stɛnt] 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.