Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are | Amy Cuddy | TED

Overview

Amy Cuddy argues that body language affects not only how others judge us but also our own thoughts, feelings, and physiology. She describes experiments in which two minutes of high-power poses were associated with changes in risk-taking and testosterone and cortisol levels, then recommends privately power posing before stressful evaluations and practicing until confidence becomes internalized.

Key takeaways

Cuddy’s two-minute posing experiment reported that 86% of high-power posers gambled, versus 60% of low-power posers.
In that experiment, high-power posing was associated with about a 20% rise in testosterone and a 25% fall in cortisol; low-power posing showed the opposite pattern.
In a five-minute mock job interview, evaluators favored high-power posers based on their presence, while ratings of speech content and qualifications showed no effect.
Cuddy recommends using power poses privately before evaluative situations—such as job interviews or public speaking—not performing them in front of other people.
Cuddy’s personal experience and a Harvard student’s progress underpin her distinction between temporarily faking confidence and practicing until it becomes an internalized sense of capability.

Chapters

0:00 Body Language Shapes Social Judgments—and Our Self-Perception

Social scientists study how nonverbal cues influence consequential judgments, including hiring, promotions, and dating.
Nalini Ambady found that judgments of physicians’ warmth from 30-second silent clips predicted whether they would be sued.
Alex Todorov found that one-second judgments of political candidates’ faces predicted 70% of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes.
Cuddy distinguishes expansive power poses from closed, small postures, which appear across humans and other primates.

5:30 Power Poses, Classroom Participation, and the Two-Minute Experiment

In her MBA classroom, Cuddy observed that students who occupied less space—often women—participated less, despite participation counting for half the grade.
With collaborator Dana Carney, Cuddy tested whether briefly adopting powerful postures could change how people felt and behaved.
The experiment compared two minutes of high-power poses with two minutes of low-power poses, then measured participants’ feelings, gambling choices, and saliva hormones.
Cuddy framed the question as whether changing the body could influence the mind, including confidence, assertiveness, and stress responses.

11:00 Study Results and Power Posing Before Job Interviews

In the study, 86% of participants in the high-power-pose condition gambled, compared with 60% in the low-power condition.
After posing, the high-power group showed about a 20% testosterone increase and 25% cortisol decrease; the low-power group showed about a 10% decrease in testosterone and 15% increase in cortisol.
In a five-minute mock interview with deliberately neutral judges, independent evaluators preferred hiring the high-power posers and rated their overall presence more positively.
Cuddy advised posing privately for two minutes before an evaluation, rather than using expansive poses during the interview itself.

15:30 From Impostor Feelings to “Fake It Till You Become It”

Cuddy recounts a car accident at age 19, a traumatic drop in her measured IQ, and her eventual return to college and graduate study at Princeton.
Her adviser Susan Fiske urged her to keep giving talks despite fear; repeated practice helped Cuddy stop feeling like an impostor.
Cuddy encouraged a quiet Harvard student who felt she did not belong to prepare a strong classroom comment; the student later became a more confident participant.
Her closing advice is to try two minutes of private power posing before stressful situations and share the technique with people who have few resources or sources of support.

Summary, takeaways, and chapters were generated by AI from the video's transcript and may contain errors. The video belongs to its creator, TED.