TED演讲：用肢体语言来塑造自己

TED

演讲：用肢体语言来塑造自己

/talks/amy_cuddy_your_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. (Laughter) 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.

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

—

(Laughter)

—

an

awkward interaction, or a smile, or a contemptuous glance, or maybe a very awkward

wink, or maybe even something like a handshake.

Narrator: Here they are arriving at Number 10, and look at this lucky policeman gets to

shake hands with the President of the United States. Oh, and here comes the Prime

Minister of the

—

? No. (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) (Applause)

Amy 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?

And 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 to you claim more value from that negotiation. If you use

them poorly, bad idea. Right? So 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. So 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.

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. 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. 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 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 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. 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 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, 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.

So 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 that 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.

So 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.

So 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 up significantly 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?

going to make you feel more powerful.

So 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

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. So this is

what happens. They come in, they spit into a vial, we for two minutes say,

this or this.

concept of power. We want them to be feeling power, right? So two minutes they do this.

We then ask them,

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 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 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-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, you know,

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.

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. Where can you actually apply this? Which we cared about, of course. And so

we think it's really, 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 it's at the lunchroom table. It could be, you know, 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.

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, no, no, that's not what we meant at all.

For 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. You are, you know, 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. Like, 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

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,

hire these people,

also evaluate these people much more positively overall.

about the content of the speech. It's about the presence that they're bringing to the speech.

We also, 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,