our body language shapes who you are

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.

0:58So, 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.

1:22Narrator: 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)

1:35(Laughter) (Applause)

1:38Amy 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?

2:04And 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?

3:19So 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.

3:37So 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.

3:56And 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.

4:55What do we do when we feel powerless? We do exactly the opposite. We close up. We

5:24So 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.

6:03I 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.

6:19But 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.

6:33So 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?

6:57So 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 outcomethat 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?

7:24There'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.

7:57So 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.

8:57So 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.

9:37So 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 upsignificantly 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."

10:19So 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.

11:03So 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.

11:28So 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.
11:44Here'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.

12:36But 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.

13:21So we published these findings, and the media are all over it, and they say, Okay, so
this is what you dowhen you go in for the job interview, right?

13:29(Laughter)

13:30You 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.

15:35So 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.

16:06When 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."

16:43So 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.

17:02Eventually 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."

18:07So 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.

18:46So 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

18:54(Applause)

18:59And 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)

19:14She 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.

19:33The 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.

20:10So 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 technologyand 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.