Power Posing
By: Katelyn Manfre
Amy Cuddy Ted Talk
Research Terminology
Theory:
(set of assumptions used to explain phenomena & offered for scientific study)-
Dr. Cuddy's theory from her speech is that your body language shapes who you are. Through multiple experiments and tests, she is able to prove to the audience how our nonverbals are a prime indicator for judgement from ourselves and others.
Naturalistic Observation:
(watching behavior in a natural environment)-
Dr. Cuddy goes in depth about the general things people do before going into an interview. She points out how most people are full of anxiety from going over notes, looking at your technology, and hunching over in your seat. She believes what you should do is find two minutes of your time to practice high-power posing before your interview. She found in an experiment this made people seem more approachable to businesses and that people were more likely to hire them than others.
Correlation:
(measure of the extent to which two factors vary together which can be positive or negative)-
The main purpose in this speech is to introduce the idea of "power posing". Dr. Cuddy shows the audience the difference between high-power poses and low-power poses. She conveys the ideas that when people often practice high-power poses, they are more confident, optimistic and abstract. Those who practice low-power posing are small minded, quiet, and hesitant to outside things. High-power poses relate to a positive forum, whereas low-power poses can be related to a more negative feel.
Big Idea
Dr. Cuddy's big idea was that your body language shapes who you are. She believes communication and interactions correlate to each other in all social settings. Cuddy affirms that our nonverbals can play a big factor to meaningful life outcomes. Through multiple experiments, Cuddy is able to prove her hypothesis that our bodies change our minds. Body language and nonverbals are a key to how we feel about ourselves and confident we really are when we get into something. She expresses that changing your posture in a situation when you are being evaluated such as " For teenagers, it's at the lunchroom table, for some people it's speaking at a school board meeting, it might be giving a pitch" can highly govern your mood about yourself and others around you.
Data
Dr. Cuddy related in her speech how social scientists have accumulated the argument that we as humans judge each other by observing other people's body language. Dr. Cuddy backed up her idea of power posing by conducting her own experiment. What she did was bring a group of people into a lab to test high power posing and low power posing. She gathered samples of each person's saliva and asked them to do one of the two categories of power posing. They were then offered to gamble. Dr. Cuddy found that people who performed the high power poses were more likely to engage in risk tolerance activities, such as gambling, and that people who performed low power poses were less likely to gamble. This experiment correlates to the big idea that our nonverbals have a high affect on how we feel about ourselves and how our bodies change our minds.