Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Do Power Postures Work?

It is pretty popular for people to explore the idea of taking power postures to achieve success in interpersonal interactions, especially negotiations, but is it empirically valid?

A recent study by Drs. Joseph Cesario and David Johnson wades into this debate with a resounding rejection of the idea of power postures’ efficacy. In a series of experimental studies, they test whether taking a power posture in realistic situations accomplishes anything. Their null results fly in the face of some established precedent.

Humintell has previously blogged on power postures, including on research finding that taking on such postures can make people feel more powerful. It is logical to assume that such a feeling will manifest in more confident behavior, but it is likely this implication that Drs. Cesario and Johnson would dispute. In fact, they situate their research as a response to the same work by Cuddy which we blogged on!

Despite the popularity of TED talks devoted to power posturing, the current study delves into the evolutionary arguments in favor of power posturing. They conclude that it would make little evolutionary sense for an animal to act differently just because it is presenting the illusion of expansiveness or power.

In order to assess these claims, they conducted a series of experiments. The first of these asked participants to watch a TED talk video on power poses and attempt to consciously hold power poses.  These were contrasted with two studies where participants were not told why they should hold such a pose, and two of these studies were conducted with multiple participants in the same room.

Each participant was then brought together to compete in various tasks involving gambling, abstract thinking, and negotiation. These were intended to see if using the power pose would actually enhance abilities or competence in any of these tasks. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they found that the participants who had been exposed to the TED talk did reliably utilize the power posture in these exercises.

Overall, there did not seem to be any evidence that power poses had beneficial effects. This should cast doubt on a lot of the established literature. The study authors note that their sample sizes were generally larger and that there were consistent problems in replicated past findings.

They even asked participants to record whether their power pose led them to feel greater senses of power, and this again failed to predict much success in terms of outcomes.

This is an exciting and emerging field of research, so it is pretty natural that there would be disparate results and contradictory findings. We are definitely hoping that future researchers continue to delve into this question!

In the meantime, there are some pretty tried and true tactics for better negotiating and reading people. Check out some of our training tools here!

Nonverbal Behavior in Relationships

holding-hands-coupleWe keep talking about nonverbal behavior with strangers, but what role does it have in close interpersonal contexts?

There is plenty of reason to think that this is important! We pick up on our romantic partner’s nonverbal behavior, even if we don’t realize that we are doing it. In a recent paper, a team of psychologists led by Dr. Ruddy Faure sought to understand whether implicit partner evaluations led to significantly different nonverbal behavior, and what that means for relationships.

This research appears motivated by questions of what exactly makes some relationships last and others fall apart. Some time ago, we blogged on Dr. John Gottman’s answer to this question. He argued that the slow growth of contempt between partners will almost invariably drive them apart over time.

Dr. Faure’s answer is not quite different, focusing on the idea of implicit partner evaluations. These basically entail our often automatic feelings towards a partner, where we begin to think badly or critically. This is a shift from previous attempts to study relationship dissolution, because most past research has focused primarily on explicit emotions.

However, this research grappled with the impressive question of how to really measure those things? How can you track the implicit evaluations and nonverbal behaviors present in relationships?

To address these concerns, the team organized an intensive project where couples were videotaped discussing contentious topics. They were then asked to complete a personal diary over 8 days. Before engaging in the taped interview, each partner was asked to assess implicit partner evaluations based on subtle questionnaires.

Importantly, the taped interviews allowed for a better understanding of what nonverbal behaviors were being displayed, especially given the implicit questionnaires completed beforehand.

Overall, they found that more positive implicit evaluations did lead to more constructive nonverbal behavior. This means that the less a partner had negative associations with their partner, the kinder they expressed their emotions during the videotaped interview.

The connections to Gottman are then pretty clear. Contempt would lead to much lower implicit evaluations, emphasizing our partners’ flaws, for instance. This would inevitably come out, even if unintentionally, when trying to discuss something contentious, in the form of negative body language.

While this sort of thin may not even be consciously noticed, it certainly has the potential to impact our interactions.

If you are curious about learning more about these subtle emotional cues in relationships, check out some of our past blogs on Dr. Gottman here and here.

Expressing Corruption?

Many of us worry about corruption amongst political elites, but could it be possible to actually recognize it in their faces?

In a pretty creative study, a team of psychologists from the California Institute of Technology sought to explore whether people could detect evidence of corruption by government officials by providing them with pictures of their faces. This study helps shed light both on efforts to effectively read other people but also on efforts by citizens to better evaluate our elected representatives.

While this may seem initially like a pretty far-fetched idea, there is a long history of research showing that people tend to make competent decisions about people’s trustworthiness from images of their faces. This has even been applied to potential leaders, where prosocial outcomes lead to positive evaluations.

However, this study makes an important break in shifting from just evaluations of a person’s charisma and perceived competence to actually determining if they have been practicing deception. Still, there is some prima facie credibility in that guilty expressions are generally identifiable.

To answer their question, the study authors undertook a series of experimental designs, showing images of politicians and asking participants to identify salient traits, such as corruptibility, dishonesty, and selfishness but also including more prosocial tendencies like competence and ambition.

In the first of these studies, participants were exposed to a series of 72 photos of actual elected officials in the United States. Of those, half had been convicted of some form of corruption, such as violations of campaign finance laws.

Before exposing participants to these photos, they were prompted with an instruction that they would have to designate the official’s level (1-5) of a given trait as quickly as possible, and they only had about four seconds to do so. This sought to ensure that people were judging based on spontaneous and initial reactions of emotional recognition.

Subsequent studies functioned similarly in an effort to strengthen the generalizability of any findings. This included varying the level of government that a given official held or using variants of the initial traits.

Overall, this series of experiments found broad support for the ability of participants to identify political corruption in faces of elected officials. This held up across variants, suggesting that it would apply more broadly outside of a limited experimental setting.

While many questions about generalizability and the precise causal mechanisms remain, this ambitious study does give us further evidence that our ability to read faces and detect deception has great potential even in photographs.

It would of course be interesting to see if an observer professionally trained in deception detection and people reading would do better.

In the meantime, check out some of Dr. Matsumoto’s work on politics and deception!