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 2 minutes.But before I give it away (白送), I want to ask you to right now, do a little audit of your body and what you are doing with your body, so how many of you are sort of making yourself smaller. Maybe you're hunching ,crossing your legs,maybe wrapping your ankles. Sometimes we hold on our arms like this. Sometimes we spread out.I see you. So I want you to pay attention to what you are doing right now, we are going to come back to that in a few minutes.And I'm hoping that if you learn to tweak a little bit,it could significantly change the way your life unfolds.So we are really fascinated with body languages and we are particularly interested in other people's body languages, you know, we are interested in, like, you know, an awkward interaction, or a smile, or a contemptuous (轻视) glance,maybe a very awkward wink or maybe even something like a handshake. 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 behaviour, 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 is a lot of reason to believe that this is valid way to look at this, so social scientists have spend a lot of time looking at the effect of our body language or other poeple's body language on judgements and we make sweeping judgements and inferences (推论) from body language and those judgemetns can predict really meaningful life outcomes like who we hire or promote, who we ask out on a date.For example,researcher at university shows that when people watch 30-second soundless clips of real physician-patient interactions, the judgement of the physician's niceness predict whether or not the physician will be sued.So it doesn't have to do so much with whether or not that physician is incompetent, but do we like the person and how they interacted.Even more dramatic .... 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 when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge others and how they judge us and what the outcomes are.We tend to forget, though,the other audience that's influenced by nonverbals and that's ourselves.We are also influenced by our nonverbals, our thoughts and our feelings and our physiology.What nonverbals am I talking about? I am a social sycologist, 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 interesed 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 ture, across the animal kingdom, it's not just limited to primates. And humans do the same thing.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 intereting thing because it really shows us how universal and old these expressions of power are.This expression which is know as pride.xx shows people who are born with sight and people who are congenitally(天生) blind do this when they win at a physical competition.They cross the over line and they've won, it doesn' mattar if they've seen anyone do it, they do this.So the arms up as 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 dont want 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 we tend to do when it comes to power is that we complement other's nonverbals. So if someone is being really powerfull with us, we tend to make ourselve smaller ,we don't mirror them  we do the opposite of them. So I'm watching the behaviours in my classroom, and what do I notice, I notce 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 middle of the room,before class even starts, like they really want to occupy space.when they sit down, they are sort of spread out, they raise their hands like this.You have other people who are virtually collapsing when they come in as 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 go like this when they raise their hand. I noticed a couple of things about this, one you're not going to be supprised, 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 seems 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 of the grade.So business school have been struggling with this gender grade gap. You get this equally qualified men and women coming in and then you get this differences in grade and it seems to be partly attributable to participation.So i started to wonder,you know,ok. So you have these people coming in like this, and they are participating. Is it possible that we could get people to fake it and would it lead them to participate more.I really want to know can you fake it till you make it? Like can you do this just for a little while and actually experience the behavioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful? So we know our nonverbals govern other people think and feel about us.There is a lot of evidence, but our question really was, do our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves? There is some evidence that they do. So for example, we smile when we feel happy, but also, when we are forced to smile by holdindg a pen in our teeth like this, it make me feels happy. So it goes both ways, when it comes to power.it also goes both ways.So when you feel powerful, you are more likely to do this.but it is also possible that, when you pretend to be powerful,you are more likely to actually feel powerful. Do the second question really was, you know, we know that our minds change our bodies,but it's also true,our bodies change our minds.And when I say mind, in the case of the powerful what am I talking about.I'm talking about the thoughts and feelings and the sort of physilogical things that make up our thoughts and feelings. And in my case that is 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 optmistic.They actually feel they are 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 risk.So there're a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people.Physilogically there are also differences on two: key hormones,xxx, stress hormon.So what we find is that high-power alpha males(大男人，首领) in primate hierarchies have high testosterone(睾丸素) and low cortisol(皮质醇), also powerful and effective leader have high testosterone and low cortisol.So what does that mean when you think about power, people tend to think only about testosterone,because that is about dominance.but realluy, 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? probally not right, you want the person who is powerful,assertive and dominant, but not very stress reactive, the person who's laid back (轻松自然的).So we know that in primate hierarchies,if an alpher 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 role changes can shape the mind.So what happens if you take a role change, what happens if you do that at a really minimal level, like this tiny manipulation ,this tiny intervention.For 2 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 bring people to this lab and run little experiment, and these people adopted, for 2 minutes,either in high-power poses or in low-power poses.And I'm just going to show you 5 of the poses, although they took on only two. So here is one,a couple more, this one has been dubbed (被授予什么称号) the "wonder woman"(神奇女侠) by the media.Here are couple more, you can be standing or youcan be sitting and here are low-power poses, you're folding up, you're making yourself small. This one is very low-power, when you're touching your neck, you really kinda protecting yourself.So this is what happened,they come in they spit into a vial, wait for 2 minutes to say "you need to do this or this". They don't look at pictures of the poses, we don't want to prime(事先指点) them with a concept of power. We want them to be feeling power,right?, so 2 minutes they do this.We then asked them "how powerful do you feel?" on a series of items and then we give them an oppounity 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% of you will gamble.When you in the low-power poses, only 60% and that's pretty whopping(非常的) significantly difference. Here's what we find on testosteron from the baseline they come in, high-power people experience about 20% inccrease, and low-power people experience about 10% decrease. so again: 2 minutes and you get this changes. here's what we get on cortisol, high-power people experienced about 25% decrease, low-power people experieced about 15% increase.so 2 minutes lead to this hormonal changes, this configure your brain to basically be eihther assertive,confident and comfortable,or really stress-reactive,and you know, feeling, sort of shut down, and we all had that feeling right? So it seems that our nonverbals do goven how we think and feel about ourselvels, so it's not just other but it's just ourselves. Also our bodies change our minds , the next question, of course,can power posing for a few minutes really change your life in meaningfull ways? so this is in the lab, it's this little task, you know.It's just a couple of minitues, 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 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 givng a pitch or giving a talk like this, or doing a job inerview. We decided that the one that most people could related because most people had been through was the job interview.So we published these findings,and the media are all over it,they say OK, so this is what you do when you go in for a job interview, right? You know, so we were of course horrified and said, OMG, no, no, no, that's not waht we meant at all.For numerous reasons, no, no, no , don't do that.Again, this is not about you talking to other peoples, it is you talking to yourself. what do you do befroe you going to a job intervewi, you do this, right?  you are sitting down, you are looking at your iphone,or your anfroid , not trying to leave anyone out. You are looking at your notes you're hunching up,  making youyuself small, when really what you should doing maybe is this, like in the bathroom, right? Do that, finding 2 minutes. So that's what we want to test. Okay?  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 5 minutes long, they are being recorded. they are being judged also,ant the judges are trained to give no nonverbal feedback, so they look like this, imagine this is the person interviewing you. So for 5 minutes, nothing, and this is worse than be heckled, poeple hate this,  it is called "standing in social quicksand". So this really spikes your cortisol, so this is the job interview we put them through, becuse we really want to see what happened. We then have these coders look at these tapes, four of them, they are blind to the hypothesis, they are blind to the condition, 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 wanna hire this people, all the high-power poses,we don't wanna hire these peple,
we also evaluate these people much more positively overall, but what's driving it? it's not about the content of speech,it's about te presence that they bring to the speech. We also, because we rate them on all these variables ralted to competence, like, how well-structured is the speech? how good is it? what are their qualifications? no effects on those things, this is what effected. These kind of things, people are bringing their ture selves basically, they're bringing themselves. They bring their ideas, but as themselves, with on, you know, residur over them. So this is what's driving the effect, or mediating the effect. So when i tell peope about this, that our bodies change our minds, our minds change our behavior and our behavior change our outcomes, they say to me , I don't, it feels fake, right? so i said , fake till you make it. I don't, it's not me, i don't want to get there and still feel like a fraud, I don't want to feel like a impostor. I don't want to get there to feel like I'm not supposed to be here. And that really resonated with me, because i want to tell you a liitle story about being a 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 the car, rolled several times, I was thrown from the car,and i woke up in a head injury rehab ward (康复中心), and I had been withdrawn from college, and I learn that my IQ had dropped by 2 standard deviations. which was very traumatic（创伤的）. 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 and i keep trying to go back. They say you are not going to finish college. you know, there are other things for you to do, but that's not going to work out for you. So I really struggled with this, and I have to say, having you identity taken from you and your core identity and for me it was being smart. Having that taken from you, there is nothing that leaves you feeling more powerless than that. So I felt entirely powerless, i worked and worked and worked, and i got luck , and i worked and got lucky, and worked. Eventually i graudated from college. It took me 4 years longer than my peers. And I convinced someone, my angel advisor 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. I was so afraid of being found the next day that w 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 are going to stay, and this is what you are going to do. You are going to fake it, you are going to every talk that you ever asked to do. you're just going to do it and do it and do it. even if you are terrified and just paralyzed. And having an out-of-body experience,until you have this moment when you say, oh my gosh, i'm doing it,i have become this, i am actually doing this, so that's what i did.5 years in grad school, a few years, you know, I'm at NorthWestern, I moved to harvard, I'm not thinking about it anymore, but for a long time I've been thinking, "not supposed to be here, not supposed to be here", so the end of my 1st year at harvard, a student who had not talked in class the entire semester, who I had said "look, you have to participate or else you are going to fail".
Came in my office, I really didn't know her at all, and she said, she came in, totally defeated, she said "I'm not supposed to be here".  and that was the moment for me, because 2 things happened. One was that I realized, oh my god, i don't feel like that anymore,but she does, I get that feeling, the second was, she is supposed to be here, she can fake it, she can become it, so I was like "yes you are, you are supposed to be here, and tomorrow, you gotta fake it, and you gotta make yourself powerful,..","and you are 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 they were like, omg, I didn't notice her sitting there, you know? She comes back to me months later,and I realized, she had not just faked it till she make it, she actually faked it till she became it.
So she had changed. So I wanna 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. The last thing I wanna leave you with is this, tiny tweaks can lead to big changes, so this is just 2 minutes, 2 minutes, 2 minutes, before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation, for 2 minutes, try doing this, in the evevator, in the 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 don'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 we wanna ask you to share the science, because this is simple. I don't have ego involved in this. Give it away, like share it with people, because the people who have being used 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 2 minutes, and it can significantly change the outcomes of their lifes.

Thank you!