Abstract
Power posing, the adoption of open and powerful postures, has effects that parallel those of actual social power. This study explored the social evaluation of adopting powerful vs. powerless body postures in men and women regarding perceived warmth, competence, and the likelihood of eliciting admiration, envy, pity, and contempt. Previous findings suggest that the display of power by women may have side effects due to gender stereotyping, namely reduced warmth ratings and negative emotional reactions. An experiment (N = 2,473) asked participants to rate pictures of men and women who adopted high-power or low-power body postures. High-power posers were rated higher on competence, admiration, envy, and contempt compared to low-power posers, whereas the opposite was true for pity. There was no impact of power posing on perceived warmth. Contrary to expectations, the poser’s gender did not moderate any of the effects. These findings suggest that non-verbal displays of power do influence fundamental dimensions of social perception and their accompanying emotional reactions but result in comparably positive and negative evaluations for both genders.
Highlights
Social power, defined as asymmetric control over valued resources in social relationships (Keltner et al, 2003; Magee and Galinsky, 2008), is accompanied by many positive cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and physiological consequences for the power holder
Because we examined the effect of power-related body language isolated from other cues that conveyed competence-related information, our results confirm the literature by demonstrating that information derived from visible body posture alone considerably influences competence perceptions
(2005), who found that participants attribute the same nonverbal behaviors to powerful men and women. Our study extends these findings, by showing that powerful men and women are met with the same emotional reactions and ascriptions of warmth and competence
Summary
Social power, defined as asymmetric control over valued resources in social relationships (Keltner et al, 2003; Magee and Galinsky, 2008), is accompanied by many positive cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and physiological consequences for the power holder (for a review, see Galinsky et al, 2015). Openness and expansiveness of body posture were repeatedly identified as proximal non-verbal correlates of possessing power in both humans and animals, whereas, the lack of power is non-verbally reflected in constricted body postures (de Waal, 1998; Carney et al, 2005; Hall et al, 2005; Huang et al, 2011) This association seems to be hard-wired because the same phenomenon occurs in higher animals as well as in humans, and even congenitally blind athletes adopt power poses after a successful competition (Tracy and Matsumoto, 2008). Expansive postures were shown to parallel desirable effects of actual power in terms of enhanced abstract thinking (Huang et al, 2011), increased thought confidence (Briñol et al, 2009), better mood and self-esteem (Nair et al, 2015), more risk taking
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