Culture TED Talks

Amy Cuddy talks power posing on CNN

Posted by:

[cnnvideo url=’http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2010/10/09/nr.power.pose.cnn’ inline=’true’]

In the TEDTalk “Your body language shapes who you are,” Amy Cuddy shared that posing for two minutes in a powerful position — with the body expansive and the limbs stretched out — can have a profound effect on how a person feels. Yesterday, Cuddy and her co-researcher Dana Carney sat down for an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon to talk about their work.

“High-power individuals take on these nonverbal behaviors,” said Cuddy in the interview, while looking at images of classic power posing. “But the question Dana and I wanted to ask was, ‘Can this work the other way around? Can you actually use these poses and make people more powerful?’”

To hear more about how power posing can affect the way we think about ourselves, watch Cuddy’s talk or read her study “Power Posing” in the journal Psychological Science. And to hear what Cuddy makes of the candidates’ body language in the debates, read the TED Blog’s Q&A with her.