Implicit Reactions to Women in High Power Body Postures: Less Wonderful But Still Weaker

Abstract

People rapidly form impressions of others based on their gender. Women tend to be liked more than men but men tend to be regarded as more powerful. However, a person’s nonverbal behavior has the potential to confirm or override these stereotypical impressions. Specifically, expansive, open body postures (e.g., based on widespread limbs) tend to convey high power compared to contracted, closed body positions. In three studies, we tested whether postural variations affected evaluations of men and women and impressions of their power. In Study 1, images of women elicited a more positive reactions than images of men in an affective misattribution procedure, but only when women enacted contracted body postures. In Studies 2 and 3, participants were slower to classify images of expansive postures as high power when enacted by women and slower to classify contracted postures as low power when enacted by men, but rated men and women similarly in explicit power-related judgments. Expansive body postures thus appeared to eliminate the usual positive reaction to women relative to men, but women still did not implicitly convey power to the same degree as men. Gender did not interfere with explicit, more controlled judgments of power. Together these studies demonstrate that gender implicitly interferes with perceptions of a person’s power, even in the presence of potentially individuating body postures.