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So if someone is being really powerful with us, we tend to make ourselves smaller.

We don't mirror them. We do the opposite of them.

So I'm watching this behavior in the classroom, and what do I notice? I notice that MBA students really exhibit the full range of power nonverbals.

So you have people who are like caricatures of alphas, really coming into the room, they get right into the middle of the room before class even starts, like they really want to occupy space.

When they sit down, they're sort of spread out.

They raise their hands like this.

You have other people who are virtually collapsing when they come in.

As soon they come in, you see it.

You see it on their faces and their bodies, and they sit in their chair and they make themselves tiny, and they go like this when they raise their hand.

I notice a couple of things about this. One, you're not going to be surprised. It seems to be related to gender. So women are much more likely to do this kind of thing than men. Women feel chronically less powerful than men, so this is not surprising.

But the other thing I noticed is that it also seemed to be related to the extent to which the students were participating, and how well they were participating. And this is really important in the MBA classroom, because participation counts for half the grade.

So business schools have been struggling with this gender grade gap.

You get these equally qualified women and men coming in and then you get these differences in grades, and it seems to be partly attributable to participation.

So I started to wonder, you know, okay, so you have these people coming in like this, and they're participating.

Is it possible that we could get people to fake it and would it lead them to participate more?

So my main collaborator Dana Carney, who's at Berkeley, and I really wanted to know, can you fake it till you make it? Like, can you do this just for a little while and actually experience a behavioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful? So we know that our nonverbals govern how other people think and feel about us.

There's a lot of evidence.

But our question really was, do our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves?

There's some evidence that they do.

So, for example, we smile when we feel happy, but also, when we're forced to smile by holding a pen in our teeth like this, it makes us feel happy.

So it goes both ways. When it comes to power, it also goes both ways.

So when you feel powerful, you're more likely to do this, but it's also possible that when you pretend to be powerful, you are more likely to actually feel powerful.

So the second question really was, you know, so we know that our minds change our bodies, but is it also true that our bodies change our minds? And when I say minds, in the case of the powerful, what am I talking about? So I'm talking about thoughts and feelings and the sort of physiological things that make up our thoughts and feelings, and in my case, that's hormones.

I look at hormones.

So what do the minds of the powerful versus the powerless look like? So powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly, more assertive and more confident, more optimistic.

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