The Power of Posture

Physiotherapists often stress the importance of improving one’s posture. Maintaining good posture is important to prevent neck and back pain, improve respiratory and digestive function and prevent injuries. New research suggests that your posture may affect the way you see yourself and also the way others see you.

In the animal kingdom, size matters.Big is dominant and postures that make the animal appear larger cause others to treat that animal as if he were more powerful. This is true for many species, including humans.

Two researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois, Li Huang and Adam Galinsky have conducted three 

separate experiments to test this theory. Their results, published in Psychological Science, reveal that posture has a strong effect in making a person think and act in a more powerful way.

In one of these experiments, participants were randomly appointed as managers or sub-ordinates while adopting expansive (i.e. open) or constricted (i.e. closed) body postures. They were instructed to sit in this position for an extended period of time. 

Participants were then asked to perform a word-completion task. They were instructed to complete a number of fragments, e.g. “l_ad”, with the first word that came to mind. Seven of the fragments could be interpreted as words related to power (“power”, “direct”, “lead”, “authority”, “control”, “command” and “rich”). For each of these that was filled out as a power word (“lead”, say, instead of “load”) the participant was secretly given a score of one point.

Although previous studies suggested a mere title is enough to produce a detectable increase in an individual’s sense of power, Dr Huang and Dr Galinsky found no difference in the word-completion scores of those told they would be managers and those told they would be subordinates.

The posture experiment, however, did make a difference. Those who had sat in an expansive pose, regardless of whether they thought of themselves as managers or subordinates, scored an average of 3.44. Those who sat in constricted postures scored an average of 2.78.

Proof that by simply changing your posture you can improve your self-esteem and feel more powerful.