Best Body Postures
To study a human behavior the most Important things to concentrate is body postures. Sitting up straight in your chair isn't just good for
your posture – it also gives you more confidence in your own thoughts,
according to a new study.
Researchers found that people who were told to sit up
straight were more likely to believe thoughts they wrote down while in that
posture concerning whether they were qualified for a job.
On the other hand, those who were slumped over their
desks were less likely to accept these written-down feelings about their own
qualifications.
The results show how our body posture can affect not only
what others think about us, but also how we think about ourselves, said Richard
Petty, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State
University.
"Most of us were taught that sitting up straight
gives a good impression to other people," Petty said. "But it turns
out that our posture can also affect how we think about ourselves. If you sit
up straight, you end up convincing yourself by the posture you're in."
Petty conducted the study with Pablo Briñol, a former
postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State now at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in
Spain, and Benjamin Wagner, a current graduate student at Ohio State. The
research appears in the October 2009 issue of the European Journal of Social
Psychology.
The study included 71 students at Ohio State. When they
entered the lab for the experiment, the participants were told they would be
taking part in two separate studies at the same time, one organized by the
business school and one by the arts school.
They were told the arts study was examining factors
contributing to people's acting abilities, in this case, the ability to
maintain a specific posture while engaging in other activities. They were
seated at a computer terminal and instructed to either "sit up
straight" and "push out [their] chest]" or "sit slouched
forward" with their "face looking at [their] knees."
While in one of these positions, students participated in
the business study, which supposedly investigated factors contributing to job
satisfaction and professional performance.
While holding their posture, students listed either three
positive or three negative personal traits relating to future professional
performance on the job.
After completing this task, the students took a survey in
which they rated themselves on how well they would do as a future professional
employee.
The results were striking.
How the students rated themselves as future professionals
depended on which posture they held as they wrote the positive or negative
traits.
Students who held the upright, confident posture were
much more likely to rate themselves in line with the positive or negative
traits they wrote down.
In other words, if they wrote positive traits about
themselves, they rated themselves more highly, and if they wrote negative
traits about themselves, they rated themselves lower.
"Their confident, upright posture gave them more
confidence in their own thoughts, whether they were positive or negative,"
Petty said.
However, students who assumed the slumped over, less
confident posture, didn't seem convinced by their own thoughts – their ratings
didn't differ much regardless of whether they wrote positive or negative things
about themselves.
The end result of this was that when students wrote
positive thoughts about themselves, they rated themselves more highly when in
the upright than the slouched posture because the upright posture led to
confidence in the positive thoughts.
However, when students wrote negative thoughts about
themselves, they rated themselves more negatively in the upright than the
slouched posture because the upright posture led to more confidence in their
negative thoughts.
Petty emphasized that while students were told to sit up
straight or to slump down, the researchers did not use the words
"confident" or "doubt" in the instructions or gave any
indication about how the posture was supposed to make them feel.
In a separate experiment, the researchers repeated the
same scenario with a different group of students, but asked them a series of
questions afterwards about how they felt during the course of the study.
"These participants didn't report feeling more
confident in the upright position than they did in the slouched position, even
though those in the upright position did report more confidence in the thoughts
they generated," Petty said.
That suggests people's thoughts are influenced by their
posture, even though they don't realize that is what's happening.
"People assume their confidence is coming from their
own thoughts. They don't realize their posture is affecting how much they
believe in what they're thinking," he said.
"If they did realize that, posture wouldn't have
such an effect."
This research extends a 2003 study by Petty and Briñol
which found similar results for head nodding. In that case, people had more
confidence in thoughts they generated when they nodded their head up and down
compared to when they shook their head from side to side.
However, Petty noted that body posture is a static pose
compared to head nodding, and probably more natural and easy to use in day-to-day
life.
"Sitting up straight is something you can train
yourself to do, and it has psychological benefits – as long as you generally
have positive thoughts," he said.
For example, students are often told when taking a
multiple-choice test that if they're not absolutely sure of the answer, their
first best guess is more often correct.
"If a student is sitting up straight, he may be more
likely to believe his first answer. But if he is slumped down, he may change it
and end up not performing as well on the test," he said.
Psychtronics.com gives the only interesting topics of
psychology and you need not to be a professional to understand the articles in
the psychtronics. They are easy to understand to every one and it is mainly for
the college students and Psychiatrists.
Like us in FB to get Updates: www.facebook.com/psychtronics
Follow us in twitter: www.twitter.com/psychtronics
Post a Comment