Thank's Leticia, it's really nice to be here.
I'd like to start with an observation,
which is that most people when
preparing for a situation in which you want to have power
will start by thinking a lot about what we're gonna say,
and we don't think twice about this it seems reasonable.
We assume going into situations like this that it's better to be right than
wrong.
We assume that it's better to be smart
sound smart than not. We assume it's better to come off competent and critical
rather than incompetent and easily misled.
and we assume that it's better
to tell people things they didn't already know than just a repeat
back to others what they burn said. I'm not gonna tell you that these beliefs
are wrong
exactly, but what I want to tell you is that they're not nearly as important
as we think they are when it comes to trying to have impact.
What's really important for you to understand is that people
are forming impressions of you and making judgments
all the time, in the blink of an eye
with their attention on very fleeting
aspects of behavior. I want to tell you
about just a few findings from my field, which is social psychology, I think lend
support to this idea that
people may not be listening as carefully to you
as you might think. One of the things that I think you should know
is that whether you're perceived as competent in groups
actually has very little to do with the quality of the
arguments that you make, but it's very tightly connected
to the quantity arguments that you make. It turns out this has been shown in many
studies now
the more a person contributes in a conversation,
the more status they acquire. And again I'm not going to say this is entirely
independent of argument quality,
but it's less tightly connected then we would like to think it is.
You should know also that when we look at
personality traits and try to predict status that ascended to leadership
positions in groups,
we found another interesting set of patterns. The
qualities in people that predict status are not tightly connected at all
to how much people know and how good we are articulating what we now.
The single strongest predictor status
on a personality level is extroversion. Extroversion is simply
the extent to which your outgoing and talkative. This is
highly predictive of status of both men and women.
I should tell you about a couple of other data points in this chart that you
may find interesting.
Neuroticism has an interesting relationship to status. So you can see
is a correlational data. Neuroticism is bad for status
in men, the good news ladies is it doesn't matter for us
at all. And finally, I just want to point out that,
you know consistent with this idea that your ability to make sound arguments is
not the most
important predictor of your status. physical attractiveness
is highly predictive of status in almost every situation
and here again. It looks like this is only true for men,
in fact that's not true. Physical attractiveness is predicting a status in
women as well,
but it's not a linear relationship. So what you'll see with women is that
physical attractiveness helps with status up to a point
and then once you've passed that threshold, it kinda starts to work against you,
which is why
you don't see statistical relationship here. So the point is just to say,
you know, if what we're doing is relying on our ability to make sound arguments
as a basis for attaining status and power,
we're kinda missing the boat. There are very strong predictors of status that
have absolutely nothing to do with these qualities.
It turns out that whether you're
arguments are persuasive also have less to do with their quality than you might
think.
And to illustrate this point I want to tell you about it say that was done
many years ago now and I tell you a little bit about it
you'll understand how long ago this was. But this was done by a psychologist at
Harvard who's name is Ellen Langer.
And what she wanted to understand was when someone ask someone else for a
favor,
what kinds of requests increase the likelihood of getting
yes. So she had her research assistants go out into the university and
visit different office buildings and look for that special place that used to
exist in office buildings where there was a room
that held one giant photocopier
and there was a line of people standing waiting to use it.
So research assistants one out in search of these lines
and their job was to approach the person who is next in line
and ask if they could cut in front of them. And they were told to make this
request
in one of three ways: Either they said may I use the xerox machine.
This is a fairly straightforward request with no justification.
Or they said, may I use the Xerox machine
because I'm in a rush. This is a request
with a logical justification. not a bad reason to let someone cut in front of you.
Or they said may use a Xerox machine
because I need to make copies.Right, it's a justification,
not the most logical one. So remember her question is
which in these types of requests is going to increase the likelihood of getting
a yes. And it turns out that giving a
justification made a difference. So if you gave a reason for your request you
are more likely to get
a yes but the logical reason had no power at all
over the reason that had absolutely no value. Right,
it's just another piece of evidence to suggest that people may not be listening
as carefully to you as you think they are, as you hoped they would be
and that the logic associated with subtleties
of your argument may be lost on many people.
One final piece of data I want to share with you is that this is something
I think most of us
see in our organizations all the time, many arguments are not even heard
until the right person makes them. So people
are assessing your status before you open your mouth
and depending on what they decide you know either they're paying attention
or they're not. So
the upshot is that people are making decisions about whether to pay attention
to you
in a very short period of time. They're gonna decide
whether you're someone who is worthy of their attention last
than a 100 milliseconds. So we need to understand how people do this.
If our goal is to have impact, we need to know what are people paying
attention to that allows them to make these kinds of assessments.
If you wanna predict the content up the impressions that people form
other people, you can look at the independent
affects of three different aspects of our behavior. You can look at the impact
of our words,
you can look at the impact of how we use our voices,
independent of our woeds and you can look at the impact
these very subtle nonverbal cues. The way we use our eyes,
the way we stand,
the types of gestures that we use and what you'll find over and over again in the
research
is that your words account for only 10 percent
or less of the variance in the impressions that people form.
So the vast majority of social meaning, the vast majority
of the meaning that people take away from their interaction with you comes
from
these physical ways of behaving and nonverbal behaviors that most of us
are almost never thinking about at all.
Something you should know about this as well, I think is really important to
understand is it in those circumstances where
our verbal messages and nonverbal messages are misaligned.
People will remember what your body told them. So it's really important I think to
develop a kind of conscious awareness of some of these things, which
most of us don't have. I wanna make the suggestion that there is
actually a body language of power and we know it.
But we know it so well we don't know we know it. So what's happened
from the day most of us are born is that we're socialized by the people who care
about us
to learn to use our bodies in ways that allow us to show others that we know our
place.
We learn how to use our bodies in ways to gain their respect other people,
we learn how to use our bodies in ways that tell people not
to mess around with us, and it's such basic aspect
our culturalization and socialization
that we learn to use our bodies to negotiate social hierarchy without any
conscious awareness and the fact that this is what we're doing.
I want to make a suggestion that very small, subtle changes in our physical behavior
can have a tremendous impact actually.
Not only on the perceptions that other people have
about us, but on our own psychology.
I don't have time right now to go into
and all the different physical determinants or that the ways in which
we display power and status are natural behavior,
I'm going to talk about that later today. But let me just address one
very important and common differentiating physical activity.
Iif you look at behavior up high and
low-ranking group members both in animals and in humans
one of the most striking differences
is that you'll notice that high-ranking group members
use their bodies in much more physically expansive ways
and lower ranking members do. So you can see in both these pictures what a
high-ranking group member will do
is making their body large. Take up as much space
as they'd like. They get-- the high-ranking member gets to define
the way space gets used. And you'll see an expansive body postures basically where
the
arms and legs are held outside the body as a way of making the footprint bigger.
Lower-ranking group members do the opposite you'll see contraction of
the body. So the limbs come closer to the body and you'll see as you do in both
these pictures
there's often a bowing, nodding, a dipping down
as a way of making a footprint smaller.
What you need to understand about this is the reason that we use these
behaviors as I mentioned before
is to signal to other people that were not
actually interested in having a fight. We use these things
actually get along with other people.
And the impact of our
non-verbal displays affects not only how people respond to us
but it reflects how we feel about ourselves and how we see ourselves
So the last thing I'd like you to do before I and today is to give you a little experience
with this
I'm going to actually ask you right now to get into an expensive posture,
they're directions right here about how you can do it. So I'm going to ask you to
make sure your elbows are away from your body, you can put your hands behind your
head,
or put the arm across a chair
and once you're-- make sure you're comfortable
that's what it's all about.
Once you're in a posh like you hold it so don't release that yet get into an
expansive posture
and holed. And what I'm going to ask you to do is to show you on the next slide is a couple sentences
and I would like you to read aloud
while you're in this posture, okay.
So get in the posture and hold it. I'm gonna count is three
and we're gonna read what comes up on the next slide together. 1, 2
3. I can't do it
I feel so helpless.
You believe it? It's like a big joke.
It's like a big joke. right? And it's not case that these thoughts are never in
your head
but it's very hard to believe what you say when your body
tell you something different, right. Let's try the alternative. Get into a contract
in her constricted posture.
So keep your hands very close to your body, make sure your knees are together,
it can help sometimes lean forward.
And if you really want to have this experience
turn one foot in. Okay,
hold this posture. Again, I'm going to ask you to read their lines on the next slide.
I'll count to three. one, two, three
I'm totally in charge,
Not so much, right?
So you get that feeling right, What I'm gonna talk about later there's actually
a lot of data coming out now to show that it's not the case
that our bodies only follow our psychology but
we actually take cues from what our bodies are telling us and the way we
hold our bodies
affects actually how powerful we feel and how powerfully we behave.
So let me just leave you with the three things I hope you would get from when I
talked about today. The first thing is
I want you to recognize the power nonverbal behavior
in determining your power and influence in situations where else would you like
to accomplish.
I also wanted to touch on the importance
being able to tune your behavior in the context of the social hierarchy
as a way of making relationships work and as a way of getting along with other
people.
And then a third thing I'd like you to recognize is that you can't really
underestimate the importance of
alignment between your body and mind
as away supporting your and
your desire to be successful in professional
roles. Thanks very much