If You Feel Taller means you Think you’re Powerful
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An inch taller
One psychological experiment says that Powerful people thinks they are taller than they are. Experiment demonstrates how a powerful feeling feeds back into self-perception of height.
Suppose if any guy is famous or intelligent then everyone
compared like he is taller like below expressions. Language can reveal all kinds of truths about
our psychology. Take these expressions:
§ He's the big man on
this project.
§ We look up to her.
§ Lady Gaga is huge.
§ He puts her on a
pedestal.
It's not hard to see the strong association here between size
and power that's embedded in the way we talk about the relations between
people.
The reason why is almost too obvious to bother stating: larger
people quite often do have more power. As children our parents, teachers and
all our authority figures are taller than us. In adult life taller people earn
higher salaries, are more likely to be in higher status jobs and more likely to
end up US
president.
And men are taller than women and have historically enjoyed more
power.
But does
the connection go both ways? Can being powerful also make us feel taller?
That's what Duguid and Goncalo (2012) checked out in this neat study.
Power up
First they measured participants' actual heights, then paired
them up. For each pair, one person was assigned the role of the boss and the
other the employee. This was apparently done on the basis of a leadership aptitude test, but actually
the results were chucked away and the leadership and employee roles were
assigned randomly.
The 'leader' was told that they would have complete power during
the task and that the employee must accept this. This ensured that one person
in each pair felt more powerful.
Afterwards, as part of what they were told was different task,
participants filled in another questionnaire. Hidden in this they were asked
their height again. So now the experimenters had two measures of height: one
before the power manipulation and one
after.
Then the experiment was stopped before the promised role-play
could be carried out.
An inch taller
The results showed that before the manipulation both groups
averaged about 66 inches in height. But after the manipulation, those in the
lower-power condition reckoned themselves to be, on average, 65.80 inches tall
while those in the high-power condition had apparently grown to 67.01 inches.
A couple of other studies by the same researchers also showed
this connection between power and height. When people felt more powerful, they
also felt taller.
This
shows that the connection between mind and body goes both ways in relation to
power. We already know that people who stand in 'power poses', feel more
powerful, and this study is showing us the connection the other way: that
feeling more powerful changes our perception of our
own bodies.
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Image source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1171399
Image source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1171399
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