In 2012, Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist who teaches at Harvard Business School, delivered a presentation at the prestigious TED Global Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her subject was body language and its effect on “the way your life unfolds.” TED presentations are offered for free online viewing, and since 2006, they’ve been watched more than a billion times worldwide. Cuddy’s talk has the distinction of being the second-most-watched TED presentation of all time, with nearly 26 million views and counting. Time magazine immediately put Cuddy on its list of “Game Changers,” and Business Insider ranked her 37th among “50 Women Who Are Changing the World.” 

What did Cuddy have to say that was so important? Basically, “Smile and sit up straight.” The advice, of course, is pretty simple, but the reason why it’s good advice is not. Cuddy had research to back her up, and that research had led her to a series of significant insights into the significance of body language. What inspired Cuddy’s research? “I noticed in class,” she recalls,

that women tended to make themselves small, holding their wrists, wrapping their arms around themselves. Guys tended to make themselves bigger. They’re leaning back, stretching out, draping their arms around chairs. We know from studies of facial feedback that if you smile, you fake yourself into feeling happier. We wondered whether just asking people to spread out would help them feel more powerful.

So Cuddy and her colleagues invited students into the social-psych laboratory for a few experimental exercises. Participants were asked to spend two minutes alone in a room striking what Cuddy calls “power poses,” either “high power” or “low power.” For high-power poses, think superhero posture—chest lifted, head held high, arms either raised or propped on the hips. (Cuddy prefers “the Wonder Woman”—hands on hips, legs wide.) Low-power poses include putting your hands on your neck and crossing your limbs. In general, says Cuddy, “expansive, open postures reflect high power, whereas contractive, closed postures reflect low power. 

Before and after the posing exercises, Cuddy’s team recorded participants’ levels of two hormones: testosterone, which is known to increase feelings of power and confidence, and cortisol, which is associated with feelings of anxiety and stress. After just two minutes of posing, high-power posers experienced a 20 percent increase in testosterone and a 25 percent drop in cortisol. “Not only do these postures reflect power,” explains Cuddy, “they also produce it.” In addition, high-power posers displayed behavior associated with the exercise of power in the real world—a fact that didn’t surprise Cuddy: “Effective leaders,” she points out, “have a classic hormone profile: high levels of testosterone, low levels of cortisol. . . . When people take over the alpha role, their testosterone rises and their cortisol drops.” 

The study’s findings show not only that our hormonal levels can change, but that we can take the initiative in changing them. The process engages a series of feedback loops. As we’ve seen, for example, the principle is evident in the effect of a smile: “Feeling happy makes us smile, and smiling makes us happy,” observes Cuddy. But what if you don’t feel like smiling? “Fake it till you become it,” she advises: Faking happiness, it seems, has pretty much the same effect as being happy. The key is the smile: Using the muscles of your face to communicate nonverbally sends a message to your brain, and as with smiling, so with standing up straight. Thus the purpose of power posing, explains Cuddy, “is to optimize your brain”—to balance your hormones in the way that you want them balanced. “Let your body tell you that you’re powerful and deserving,” she says, and when you pass that message along to your brain, “you become more present, enthusiastic, and authentically yourself.” 

Perhaps even more importantly, adds Cuddy, the feedback that you get from such nonverbal behavior as smiling “is also contagious. We tend to mirror one another’s nonverbal expressions and emotions, so when we see someon beaming and emanating genuine warmth, we can’t resist smiling ourselves.” In addition, such responses typically reflect first impressions and often contribute to snap judgments about people—what Cuddy calls “spontaneous trait inferences.” Her research has thus extended to the effect of body language on first impressions, and she’s found that there are two critical variables: warmth and competence. These two factors, she says, account for 90 percent of our evaluations of other people and, more importantly, shape the way we feel about and act toward them. 

Unfortunately, projections of both warmth and competence can produce seemingly contradictory behavior in other people. According to Cuddy,

people judged to be competent but lacking in warmth often elicit envy in others, an emotion involving both respect and resentment that cuts both ways. When we respect someone, we want to cooperate or affiliate ourselves with him or her, but resentment can make that person vulnerable to harsh reprisal. . . . On the other hand, people judged as warm but incompetent tend to elicit pity, which also involves a mix of emotions: Compassion moves us to help those we pity, but our lack of respect leads us ultimately to neglect them. 

The first type that Cuddy describes here falls into the category cold/competent and the second into the category warm/incompetent—two of four categories into which people may fit in Cuddy’s warmth/competence matrix. At the extremes are warm/competent, which elicits admiration, helping, and cooperation, and cold/incompetent, which elicits contempt, neglect, and harassment (and even violence). 

As revealing as it is, this matrix raises further questions: Is there any difference between, say, warm/competent and competent/warm and, if so, which is optimum, particularly if one’s job involves leading other people? According to Cuddy, “putting competence first undermines leadership” because doing so fails to prioritize the most important factor in any relationship—trust. “Prioritizing warmth,” she says 

helps you connect immediately with those around you, demonstrating that you hear them, understand them, and can be trusted by them . . . In management settings, trust increases information sharing, openness, and cooperation . . . . Most important, it provides the opportunity to change people’s attitudes and beliefs, not just their outward behavior. That’s the sweet spot when it comes to the ability to get people to fully accept your message.

So, how can you project warmth? First, says Cuddy, “Find the right level . . . . Aim for a tone that suggests that you’re leveling with people—that you’re sharing the straight scoop, with no pretense or emotional adornment.” Second, “validate feelings”: Begin by agreeing with people, letting them know right off that “you hold roughly the same worldview that they do.” Last but not least, “Smile—and mean it.” 

Cuddy hastens to add that coming across effectively is a matter of prioritizing, not of minimizing one trait in favor of the other. The best way to lead, she concludes, “is to combine warmth and strength. . . . The traits can actually be mutually reinforcing: Feeling a sense of personal strength helps us to be more open, less threatened, and less threatening in stressful situations. When we feel confident and calm, we project authenticity and warmth

 

Case Questions 

1. What about you? How do you sit in class? Does Cuddy’s description of students’ classroom body language seem to apply to you? Specifically, what might you do to improve your classroom body language? How about your body language in other situations? 

2. Review the section in the text on “Individual Barriers” to communication. How might Cuddy’s analysis of the impressions that we make on people help in understanding these barriers? More specifically, how might that analysis be used in helping to overcome them? Now ask yourself which of these barriers seem to affect your own communication habits. How might Cuddy’s analysis help you to understand and deal with the barriers to your own communication habits? 

3. Here’s a list of Cuddy’s four ideal types in the warmth/ competence matrix, along with examples of people who, according to her research, tend to fall into each category:

• Warm/competent—fathers 

• Warm/incompetent—working mothers 

• Cold/competent—Asian students 

• Cold/incompetent—economically disadvantaged people  

Bearing in mind that these examples reflect generalized perceptions of people, explain why each group falls into its respective category. Add another group to each category. Explain the role played by stereotyping in assigning people to each category. Finally, to what extent do you yourself tend to succumb to these generalizations? 

4. As we’ve seen, Cuddy has observed “a gender grade gap” in her MBA classes at Harvard, in which classroom participation accounts for a significant portion of students’ grades. “It’s competitive—you really have to get in there,” she says, and women aren’t quite as successful at contributing to discussions as men. Men, she reports, volunteer to answer questions by shooting their arms in the air while women tend toward a polite bent-elbow wave. Women often touch their faces and necks while talking and tend to sit with tightly crossed ankles. “These postures,” says Cuddy, “are associated with powerlessness and intimidation and keep people from expressing who they really are.” Cuddy’s research also reveals that nonwhite males are often subject to the same disadvantages and exhibit similar behaviors when participating in classroom discussion 

Why does this “gender gap” exist in the classroom?