KK-Clubs

Do a little audit of your body

So I want to start by offering you a free no tech life hack, and all it requires of you is 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 yourself smaller? Maybe you’re hunching, crossing your legs, maybe wrapping your ankles, sometimes we hold on to our arms like this sometimes, we spread out. 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 sort of learn to tweak this a little bit it could significantly change the way your life unfolds. 

A handshake or the lack of the handshake

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 an awkward interaction, or a smile, or a contemptuous glance, or maybe a very awkward wink, or maybe even something like a handshake. Here they are arriving at number 10 and look at this lucky policeman who gets to shake hands with the President of the United States, or the prime minister of it.

So a handshake or the lack of the handshake can have us talking for weeks and weeks and weeks, even the BBC in the New York Times.

Who we hire, or promote, who we ask out on a date

So obviously when we think about nonverbal behaviour, or body language but we call it nonverbal, as social scientists its 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 social scientists have spent a long 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, Melanie, 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 dramatically. Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates faces in just one second predicts 70% of US 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, it’s a bad idea, right?

We are also influenced by our nonverbal

So when we think of nonverbal, 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 nonverbal, and that’s ourselves. We are also influenced by our nonverbal, our thoughts, and our feelings, and our physiology.

So what nonverbal 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. 

Nonverbal expressions of power and dominance

I became especially interested in nonverbal expressions of power and dominance, and what are non-verbal 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, and 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, 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 and we feel powerless, we do it 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. 

In the MBA classroom

Is that we complement the others nonverbals, so if someone’s 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 behaviour in the classroom, and what do I notice, I notice that MBA students really exhibit the full range of power nonverbal, so you have people who are like caricatures of alphas, like really coming to 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 as they come , and 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 raised their hands, I noticed a couple 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 its 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.

Can you fake it til you make it

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 til you make it. Like can you do this just for a little while, and actually experience a behavioural 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 when 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, is it also true that that our bodies change our minds? 

Differences on two key hormones, testosterone, and cortisol 

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 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 are also 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 and 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 powerful people tended to think only about testosterone, because that wasn’t 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 butts really stress reactive, probably not right, you want the person who’s powerful, assertive, and dominant. But not very stress reactive, the person who’s laid-back, you know where can you actually apply this which we cared about, of course, and so we think it’s really what matters 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 at the lunchroom table, it could be you know for some people speaking at a school board meeting, it might be giving a pitch, or giving a talk like this, or doing a job interview.

Our bodies change our minds

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, and they say okay, so this is what you do when you go in for the job interview, right? you know, so we were of course horrified, and I said oh my god, 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 hunting 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 a couple. They do higher blow power poses again, they go through a very stressful job interview. It’s five minutes long and they are being recorded. They’re being judged, also and the judges are trained to give no nonverbal feedback so um, when I tell people about this, our bodies change our minds, and our minds can change our behaviour, and our behaviour can change our outcomes. They say to me I don’t if you’ll fake right, so I said fake it till you make it, because I want to tell you a little story about being an impostor and feeling like.

I moved to Harvard, I’m in Harvard

I’m not supposed to be here when 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 like just, you know there’s 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 your identity taken from you, your core identity and if 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 worked and I got lucky and worked and got lucky and worked. Eventually I graduated from college, took me four years longer than my peers, and I convinced someone by 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 talking, 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 were going to fake it, you’re going to take 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 in Harvard. I’m not really thinking about it anymore, but for a long time, I had been thinking not supposed to be here, not supposed to be here.

Faked it till you become it

So 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 got to participate or else you’re going to fail, came into my office. I really didn’t know her at all and she said 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. You know, I don’t feel that anymore, but she does, and I get that feeling, and the second one, she is supposed to be here like she can fake it she can become it she was like yes, you are, you are supposed to be here and tomorrow, you’re gonna fake it, you’re gonna make yourself powerful, and you know you’re gonna, and you’re gonna go. We’re gonna go into the classroom, and you are gonna give the best comment ever, you know, and she gave the best comment ever, and people turned on.

They’re like, oh my god, I didn’t even notice her sitting there, you know, she comes back to me months later, and I realise 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, you know it’s not do it enough until you actually become it and internalise.

The 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 door.

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