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So I want to start by offering you a free

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no-tech life hack,

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and all it requires of you is this:

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that you change your posture for two minutes.

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But before I give it away, I want to ask you to right now

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do a little audit of your body and what you're doing with your body.

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So how many of you are sort of making yourselves smaller?

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Maybe you're hunching, crossing your legs,

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maybe wrapping your ankles.

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Sometimes we hold onto our arms like this.

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Sometimes we spread out. (Laughter)

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I see you. (Laughter)

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So I want you to pay attention to what you're doing right now.

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We're going to come back to that in a few minutes,

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and I'm hoping that if you learn to tweak this a little bit,

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it could significantly change the way your life unfolds.

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So, we're really fascinated with body language,

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and we're particularly interested

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in other people's body language.

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You know, we're interested in, like, you know — (Laughter) —

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an awkward interaction, or a smile,

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or a contemptuous glance, or maybe a very awkward wink,

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or maybe even something like a handshake.

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Narrator: Here they are arriving at Number 10, and look at this

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lucky policeman gets to shake hands with the President

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of the United States. Oh, and here comes

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the Prime Minister of the — ? No. (Laughter) (Applause)

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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Amy Cuddy: So a handshake, or the lack of a handshake,

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can have us talking for weeks and weeks and weeks.

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Even the BBC and The New York Times.

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So obviously when we think about nonverbal behavior,

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or body language -- but we call it nonverbals as social scientists --

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it's language, so we think about communication.

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When we think about communication, we think about interactions.

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So what is your body language communicating to me?

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What's mine communicating to you?

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And there's a lot of reason to believe that this is a valid

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way to look at this. So social scientists have spent a lot

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of time looking at the effects of our body language,

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or other people's body language, on judgments.

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And we make sweeping judgments and inferences from body language.

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And those judgments can predict really meaningful life outcomes

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like who we hire or promote, who we ask out on a date.

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For example, Nalini Ambady, a researcher at Tufts University,

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shows that when people watch 30-second soundless clips

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of real physician-patient interactions,

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their judgments of the physician's niceness

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predict whether or not that physician will be sued.

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So it doesn't have to do so much with whether or not

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that physician was incompetent, but do we like that person

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and how they interacted?

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Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown

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us that judgments of political candidates' faces

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in just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senate

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and gubernatorial race outcomes,

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and even, let's go digital,

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emoticons used well in online negotiations

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can lead to you claim more value from that negotiation.

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If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right?

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So when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge

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others, how they judge us and what the outcomes are.

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We tend to forget, though, the other audience

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that's influenced by our nonverbals, and that's ourselves.

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We are also influenced by our nonverbals, our thoughts

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and our feelings and our physiology.

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So what nonverbals am I talking about?

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I'm a social psychologist. I study prejudice,

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and I teach at a competitive business school,

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so it was inevitable that I would become interested in power dynamics.

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I became especially interested in nonverbal expressions

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of power and dominance.

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And what are nonverbal expressions of power and dominance?

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Well, this is what they are.

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So in the animal kingdom, they are about expanding.

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So you make yourself big, you stretch out,

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you take up space, you're basically opening up.

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It's about opening up. And this is true

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across the animal kingdom. It's not just limited to primates.

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And humans do the same thing. (Laughter)

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So they do this both when they have power sort of chronically,

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and also when they're feeling powerful in the moment.

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And this one is especially interesting because it really shows us

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how universal and old these expressions of power are.

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This expression, which is known as pride,

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Jessica Tracy has studied. She shows that

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people who are born with sight

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and people who are congenitally blind do this

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when they win at a physical competition.

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So when they cross the finish line and they've won,

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it doesn't matter if they've never seen anyone do it.

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They do this.

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So the arms up in the V, the chin is slightly lifted.

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What do we do when we feel powerless? We do exactly

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the opposite. We close up. We wrap ourselves up.

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We make ourselves small. We don't want to bump into the person next to us.

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So again, both animals and humans do the same thing.

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And this is what happens when you put together high

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and low power. So what we tend to do

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when it comes to power is that we complement the other's nonverbals.

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So if someone is being really powerful with us,

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we tend to make ourselves smaller. We don't mirror them.

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We do the opposite of them.

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So I'm watching this behavior in the classroom,

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and what do I notice? I notice that MBA students

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really exhibit the full range of power nonverbals.

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So you have people who are like caricatures of alphas,

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really coming into the room, they get right into the middle of the room

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before class even starts, like they really want to occupy space.

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When they sit down, they're sort of spread out.

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They raise their hands like this.

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You have other people who are virtually collapsing

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when they come in. As soon they come in, you see it.

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You see it on their faces and their bodies, and they sit

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in their chair and they make themselves tiny,

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and they go like this when they raise their hand.

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I notice a couple of things about this.

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One, you're not going to be surprised.

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It seems to be related to gender.

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So women are much more likely to do this kind of thing than men.

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Women feel chronically less powerful than men,

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so this is not surprising. But the other thing I noticed is that

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it also seemed to be related to the extent to which

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the students were participating, and how well they were participating.

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And this is really important in the MBA classroom,

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because participation counts for half the grade.

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So business schools have been struggling with this gender grade gap.

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You get these equally qualified women and men coming in

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and then you get these differences in grades,

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and it seems to be partly attributable to participation.

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So I started to wonder, you know, okay,

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so you have these people coming in like this, and they're

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participating. Is it possible that we could get people to fake it

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and would it lead them to participate more?

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So my main collaborator Dana Carney, who's at Berkeley,

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and I really wanted to know, can you fake it 'til you make it?

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Like, can you do this just for a little while and actually

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experience a behavioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful?

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So we know that our nonverbals govern how other people

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think and feel about us. There's a lot of evidence.

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But our question really was, do our nonverbals

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govern how we think and feel about ourselves?

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There's some evidence that they do.

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So, for example, we smile when we feel happy,

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but also, when we're forced to smile

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by holding a pen in our teeth like this, it makes us feel happy.

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So it goes both ways. When it comes to power,

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it also goes both ways. So when you feel powerful,

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you're more likely to do this, but it's also possible that

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when you pretend to be powerful, you are more likely

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to actually feel powerful.

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So the second question really was, you know,

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so we know that our minds change our bodies,

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but is it also true that our bodies change our minds?

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And when I say minds, in the case of the powerful,

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what am I talking about?

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So I'm talking about thoughts and feelings

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and the sort of physiological things that make up our thoughts and feelings,

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and in my case, that's hormones. I look at hormones.

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So what do the minds of the powerful versus the powerless

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look like?

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So powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly,

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more assertive and more confident, more optimistic.

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They actually feel that they're going to win even at games of chance.

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They also tend to be able to think more abstractly.

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So there are a lot of differences. They take more risks.

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There are a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people.

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Physiologically, there also are differences on two

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key hormones: testosterone, which is the dominance hormone,

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and cortisol, which is the stress hormone.

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So what we find is that

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high-power alpha males in primate hierarchies

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have high testosterone and low cortisol,

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and powerful and effective leaders also have

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high testosterone and low cortisol.

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So what does that mean? When you think about power,

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people to tended to think only about testosterone,

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because that was about dominance.

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But really, power is also about how you react to stress.

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So do you want the high-power leader that's dominant,

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high on testosterone, but really stress reactive?

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Probably not, right? You want the person

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who's powerful and assertive and dominant,

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but not very stress reactive, the person who's laid back.

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So we know that in primate hierarchies, if an alpha

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needs to take over, if an individual needs to take over

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an alpha role sort of suddenly,

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within a few days, that individual's testosterone has gone up

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significantly and his cortisol has dropped significantly.

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So we have this evidence, both that the body can shape

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the mind, at least at the facial level,

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and also that role changes can shape the mind.

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So what happens, okay, you take a role change,

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what happens if you do that at a really minimal level,

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like this tiny manipulation, this tiny intervention?

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"For two minutes," you say, "I want you to stand like this,

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and it's going to make you feel more powerful."

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So this is what we did. We decided to bring people

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into the lab and run a little experiment, and these people

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adopted, for two minutes, either high-power poses

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or low-power poses, and I'm just going to show you

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five of the poses, although they took on only two.

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So here's one.

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A couple more.

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This one has been dubbed the "Wonder Woman"

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by the media.

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Here are a couple more.

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So you can be standing or you can be sitting.

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And here are the low-power poses.

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So you're folding up, you're making yourself small.

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This one is very low-power.

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When you're touching your neck,

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you're really protecting yourself.

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So this is what happens. They come in,

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they spit into a vial,

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we for two minutes say, "You need to do this or this."

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They don't look at pictures of the poses. We don't want to prime them

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with a concept of power. We want them to be feeling power,

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right? So two minutes they do this.

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We then ask them, "How powerful do you feel?" on a series of items,

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and then we give them an opportunity to gamble,

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and then we take another saliva sample.

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That's it. That's the whole experiment.

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So this is what we find. Risk tolerance, which is the gambling,

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what we find is that when you're in the high-power

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pose condition, 86 percent of you will gamble.

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When you're in the low-power pose condition,

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only 60 percent, and that's a pretty whopping significant difference.

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Here's what we find on testosterone.

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From their baseline when they come in, high-power people

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experience about a 20 percent increase,

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and low-power people experience about a 10 percent decrease.

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So again, two minutes, and you get these changes.

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Here's what you get on cortisol. High-power people

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experience about a 25 percent decrease, and

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the low-power people experience about a 15 percent increase.

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So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes

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that configure your brain to basically be either

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assertive, confident and comfortable,

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or really stress-reactive, and, you know, feeling

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sort of shut down. And we've all had the feeling, right?

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So it seems that our nonverbals do govern

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how we think and feel about ourselves,

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so it's not just others, but it's also ourselves.

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Also, our bodies change our minds.

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But the next question, of course, is

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can power posing for a few minutes

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really change your life in meaningful ways?

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So this is in the lab. It's this little task, you know,

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it's just a couple of minutes. Where can you actually

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apply this? Which we cared about, of course.

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And so we think it's really, what matters, I mean,

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where you want to use this is evaluative situations

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like social threat situations. Where are you being evaluated,

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either by your friends? Like for teenagers it's at the lunchroom table.

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It could be, you know, for some people it's speaking

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at a school board meeting. It might be giving a pitch

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or giving a talk like this

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or doing a job interview.

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We decided that the one that most people could relate to

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because most people had been through

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was the job interview.

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So we published these findings, and the media

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are all over it, and they say, Okay, so this is what you do

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when you go in for the job interview, right? (Laughter)

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You know, so we were of course horrified, and said,

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

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For numerous reasons, no, no, no, don't do that.

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Again, this is not about you talking to other people.

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It's you talking to yourself. What do you do

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before you go into a job interview? You do this.

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Right? You're sitting down. You're looking at your iPhone --

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or your Android, not trying to leave anyone out.

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You are, you know, you're looking at your notes,

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you're hunching up, making yourself small,

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when really what you should be doing maybe is this,

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like, in the bathroom, right? Do that. Find two minutes.

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So that's what we want to test. Okay?

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So we bring people into a lab, and

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they do either high- or low-power poses again,

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they go through a very stressful job interview.

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It's five minutes long. They are being recorded.

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They're being judged also, and the judges

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are trained to give no nonverbal feedback,

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so they look like this. Like, imagine

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this is the person interviewing you.

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So for five minutes, nothing, and this is worse than being heckled.

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People hate this. It's what Marianne LaFrance calls

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"standing in social quicksand."

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So this really spikes your cortisol.

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So this is the job interview we put them through,

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because we really wanted to see what happened.

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We then have these coders look at these tapes, four of them.

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They're blind to the hypothesis. They're blind to the conditions.

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They have no idea who's been posing in what pose,

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and they end up looking at these sets of tapes,

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and they say, "Oh, we want to hire these people," --

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all the high-power posers -- "we don't want to hire these people.

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We also evaluate these people much more positively overall."

300
00:14:50,890 --> 00:14:55,626
But what's driving it? It's not about the content of the speech.

301
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It's about the presence that they're bringing to the speech.

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We also, because we rate them on all these variables

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related to competence, like, how well-structured

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is the speech? How good is it? What are their qualifications?

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No effect on those things. This is what's affected.

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These kinds of things. People are bringing their true selves,

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basically. They're bringing themselves.

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They bring their ideas, but as themselves,

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with no, you know, residue over them.

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So this is what's driving the effect, or mediating the effect.

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So when I tell people about this,

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that our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior,

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and our behavior can change our outcomes, they say to me,

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"I don't -- It feels fake." Right?

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So I said, fake it 'til you make it. I don't -- It's not me.

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I don't want to get there and then still feel like a fraud.

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I don't want to feel like an impostor.

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I don't want to get there only to feel like I'm not supposed to be here.

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And that really resonated with me,

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because I want to tell you a little story about

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being an impostor and feeling like I'm not supposed to be here.

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When I was 19, I was in a really bad car accident.

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I was thrown out of a car, rolled several times.

324
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I was thrown from the car. And I woke up in a head injury

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rehab ward, and I had been withdrawn from college,

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and I learned that my I.Q. had dropped by two standard deviations,

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which was very traumatic.

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I knew my I.Q. because I had identified with being smart,

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and I had been called gifted as a child.

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So I'm taken out of college, I keep trying to go back.

331
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They say, "You're not going to finish college.

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Just, you know, there are other things for you to do,

333
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but that's not going to work out for you."

334
00:16:32,277 --> 00:16:36,161
So I really struggled with this, and I have to say,

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having your identity taken from you, your core identity,

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and for me it was being smart,

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having that taken from you, there's nothing that leaves you feeling more powerless than that.

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So I felt entirely powerless. I worked and worked and worked,

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and I got lucky, and worked, and got lucky, and worked.

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Eventually I graduated from college.

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It took me four years longer than my peers,

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and I convinced someone, my angel advisor, Susan Fiske,

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00:16:59,756 --> 00:17:02,700
to take me on, and so I ended up at Princeton,

344
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and I was like, I am not supposed to be here.

345
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I am an impostor.

346
00:17:06,845 --> 00:17:08,426
And the night before my first-year talk,

347
00:17:08,426 --> 00:17:11,064
and the first-year talk at Princeton is a 20-minute talk

348
00:17:11,064 --> 00:17:13,099
to 20 people. That's it.

349
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I was so afraid of being found out the next day

350
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that I called her and said, "I'm quitting."

351
00:17:18,799 --> 00:17:20,655
She was like, "You are not quitting,

352
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because I took a gamble on you, and you're staying.

353
00:17:23,213 --> 00:17:25,404
You're going to stay, and this is what you're going to do.

354
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You are going to fake it.

355
00:17:26,761 --> 00:17:30,541
You're going to do every talk that you ever get asked to do.

356
00:17:30,541 --> 00:17:32,280
You're just going to do it and do it and do it,

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even if you're terrified and just paralyzed

358
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and having an out-of-body experience, until you have

359
00:17:37,827 --> 00:17:40,992
this moment where you say, 'Oh my gosh, I'm doing it.

360
00:17:40,992 --> 00:17:43,958
Like, I have become this. I am actually doing this.'"

361
00:17:43,958 --> 00:17:46,368
So that's what I did. Five years in grad school,

362
00:17:46,368 --> 00:17:48,109
a few years, you know, I'm at Northwestern,

363
00:17:48,109 --> 00:17:50,696
I moved to Harvard, I'm at Harvard, I'm not really

364
00:17:50,696 --> 00:17:54,196
thinking about it anymore, but for a long time I had been thinking,

365
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"Not supposed to be here. Not supposed to be here."

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00:17:56,500 --> 00:17:58,978
So at the end of my first year at Harvard,

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00:17:58,978 --> 00:18:03,544
a student who had not talked in class the entire semester,

368
00:18:03,544 --> 00:18:06,751
who I had said, "Look, you've gotta participate or else you're going to fail,"

369
00:18:06,751 --> 00:18:09,253
came into my office. I really didn't know her at all.

370
00:18:09,253 --> 00:18:13,235
And she said, she came in totally defeated, and she said,

371
00:18:13,235 --> 00:18:19,280
"I'm not supposed to be here."

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And that was the moment for me. Because two things happened.

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00:18:23,408 --> 00:18:24,902
One was that I realized,

374
00:18:24,902 --> 00:18:28,136
oh my gosh, I don't feel like that anymore. You know.

375
00:18:28,136 --> 00:18:30,818
I don't feel that anymore, but she does, and I get that feeling.

376
00:18:30,818 --> 00:18:33,455
And the second was, she is supposed to be here!

377
00:18:33,455 --> 00:18:35,259
Like, she can fake it, she can become it.

378
00:18:35,259 --> 00:18:38,999
So I was like, "Yes, you are! You are supposed to be here!

379
00:18:38,999 --> 00:18:40,434
And tomorrow you're going to fake it,

380
00:18:40,434 --> 00:18:43,498
you're going to make yourself powerful, and, you know,

381
00:18:43,498 --> 00:18:46,521
you're gonna — " (Applause)

382
00:18:46,521 --> 00:18:48,560
(Applause)

383
00:18:48,560 --> 00:18:52,993
"And you're going to go into the classroom,

384
00:18:52,993 --> 00:18:55,417
and you are going to give the best comment ever."

385
00:18:55,417 --> 00:18:58,422
You know? And she gave the best comment ever,

386
00:18:58,422 --> 00:18:59,285
and people turned around and they were like,

387
00:18:59,285 --> 00:19:02,729
oh my God, I didn't even notice her sitting there, you know? (Laughter)

388
00:19:02,729 --> 00:19:05,600
She comes back to me months later, and I realized

389
00:19:05,600 --> 00:19:07,884
that she had not just faked it 'til she made it,

390
00:19:07,884 --> 00:19:10,608
she had actually faked it 'til she became it.

391
00:19:10,608 --> 00:19:12,431
So she had changed.

392
00:19:12,431 --> 00:19:16,515
And so I want to say to you, don't fake it 'til you make it.

393
00:19:16,515 --> 00:19:19,312
Fake it 'til you become it. You know? It's not —

394
00:19:19,312 --> 00:19:22,953
Do it enough until you actually become it and internalize.

395
00:19:22,953 --> 00:19:25,608
The last thing I'm going to leave you with is this.

396
00:19:25,608 --> 00:19:30,080
Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes.

397
00:19:30,080 --> 00:19:32,577
So this is two minutes.

398
00:19:32,577 --> 00:19:34,313
Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes.

399
00:19:34,313 --> 00:19:37,559
Before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation,

400
00:19:37,559 --> 00:19:40,265
for two minutes, try doing this, in the elevator,

401
00:19:40,265 --> 00:19:43,504
in a bathroom stall, at your desk behind closed doors.

402
00:19:43,504 --> 00:19:45,944
That's what you want to do. Configure your brain

403
00:19:45,944 --> 00:19:47,766
to cope the best in that situation.

404
00:19:47,766 --> 00:19:50,731
Get your testosterone up. Get your cortisol down.

405
00:19:50,731 --> 00:19:54,697
Don't leave that situation feeling like, oh, I didn't show them who I am.

406
00:19:54,697 --> 00:19:57,049
Leave that situation feeling like, oh, I really feel like

407
00:19:57,049 --> 00:19:58,885
I got to say who I am and show who I am.

408
00:19:58,885 --> 00:20:01,427
So I want to ask you first, you know,

409
00:20:01,427 --> 00:20:05,208
both to try power posing,

410
00:20:05,208 --> 00:20:07,094
and also I want to ask you

411
00:20:07,094 --> 00:20:10,322
to share the science, because this is simple.

412
00:20:10,322 --> 00:20:12,199
I don't have ego involved in this. (Laughter)

413
00:20:12,199 --> 00:20:14,086
Give it away. Share it with people,

414
00:20:14,086 --> 00:20:15,947
because the people who can use it the most are the ones

415
00:20:15,947 --> 00:20:20,105
with no resources and no technology

416
00:20:20,105 --> 00:20:23,231
and no status and no power. Give it to them

417
00:20:23,231 --> 00:20:24,514
because they can do it in private.

418
00:20:24,514 --> 00:20:27,343
They need their bodies, privacy and two minutes,

419
00:20:27,343 --> 00:20:30,493
and it can significantly change the outcomes of their life.

420
00:20:30,493 --> 00:20:34,679
Thank you. (Applause)

421
00:20:34,679 --> 00:20:41,569
(Applause)