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A couple of points:

1) As far as interviews are concerned (or any dialogue) mirroring might get you further than power -- eg: when your interviewer crosses his/her arms, you might gain an advantage doing the same - whatever the "power poses" theory says. I suppose it is like language: Short, conscience sentences might be "powerful" or "commanding" -- but that alone doesn't make for effective prose in all cases. No communication without context.

2) Sitting in a room for two minutes, relaxing, convinced that you're doing a "power poise" -- might elevate your hormone levels. I'm sure screaming a battle cry, or doing a haka would work to. Not sure if it is just the poise in itself that helps with the levels. Would be interesting to do a reverse test: tell people that a "low power" position is actually a "power position" and vice versa -- and redo the experiment. I highly doubt we've got strong evolutionary ties to sitting with our feet up on a swivel chair.

3) The point about blind athletes -- so you imply blind people don't have socialized behaviour? Thankfully you don't have to live in an isolation chamber just because you're blind.

[edit: formatting x2]




Re: #2, My understanding of the experiment is that they simply had people assume poses, and then measured their hormone levels. If they really did tell them up front whether the pose was intended to make them feel powerful, that would certainly be an egregious mistake in the methodology, but that wasn't the impression I had from hearing the TED talk.

Actually, I wonder if you could even pull of that version of the experiment without the participants seeing through it ("No really, shrinking into your chair and looking at the floor is a great display of power!").


I didn't really mean to imply that that's how the experiment was initially performed -- or that there's no correlation between poses and hormone levels.

I was more wondering if the results could be replicated with different poses (and a different context).

Then again, if people already "know" that the poses are (relatively) high or low power (hence are able to "see through" false explanations in an alternative study) -- perhaps the mental state is more important than the actual pose.




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