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We want them to be feeling power. So two minutes they do this.

We then ask them, "How powerful do you feel?" on a series of items, and then we give them an opportunity to gamble, and then we take another saliva sample. That's it. That's the whole experiment.

So this is what we find.

Risk tolerance, which is the gambling, we find that when you are in the high-power pose condition, 86 percent of you will gamble.

When you're in the low-power pose condition, only 60 percent, and that's a whopping significant difference.

Here's what we find on testosterone.

From their baseline when they come in, high-power people experience about a 20-percent increase, and low-power people experience about a 10-percent decrease.

So again, two minutes, and you get these changes.

Here's what you get on cortisol.

High-power people experience about a 25-percent decrease, and the low-power people experience about a 15-percent increase.

So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and feeling sort of shut down.

And we've all had the feeling, right? So it seems that our nonverbals do govern how we think and feel about ourselves, so it's not just others, but it's also ourselves.

Also, our bodies change our minds.

But the next question, of course, is, can power posing for a few minutes really change your life in meaningful ways?

This is in the lab, it's this little task, it's just a couple of minutes.

Where can you actually apply this? Which we cared about, of course.

And so we think where you want to use this is evaluative situations, like social threat situations.

Where are you being evaluated, either by your friends? For teenagers, it's at the lunchroom table.

For some people it's speaking at a school board meeting.

It might be giving a pitch or giving a talk like this or doing a job interview.

We decided that the one that most people could relate to because most people had been through, was the job interview.

So we published these findings, and the media are all over it, and they say, Okay, so this is what you do when you go in for the job interview, right?

You know, so we were of course horrified, and said, Oh my God, no, that's not what we meant at all.

For numerous reasons, no, don't do that.

Again, this is not about you talking to other people.

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