Power Poses Affect Risk Tolerance and Skin Conductance Levels

Abstract

Humans are used to express their feelings of selfconfidence/ powerfulness or their distress/sadness through either expansive postures that occupy as much space as possible or closing postures occupying as less space as possible to avoid contact. This conduct suggests that feelings of selfconfidence/ powerfulness or distress/sadness change our body expressions/postures. It can be interesting to assess whether the reverse is also true, i.e. the way we arrange our body at a given moment would affect our feelings. The present research reports an investigation on such argument. To this aim, 50 subjects (25 females) aged between 23 and 31 years were requested to adopt either an expansive (high-powered) or contracted (low-powered) posture for as long as 3 minutes and then asked to bet money in a dice game. The results show that assuming high-power poses favors risk tolerant behaviors and rises feelings of powerfulness. This is not true in the case of low-power postures, which engender a sense of stress, sustained by a significant increase of skin conductance levels. Considerations are made on how to exploit these results for psychotherapy and rehabilitation purposes, as well as, for the implementation of artificial intelligent systems operating as tools for well-being and coaching.