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This kind of article doesn't address the issue known as Chesterton's fence [1]. If so-called "low power" poses are so bad for you, why have they survived evolut

by zeteo 14y ago

This kind of article doesn't address the issue known as Chesterton's fence [1]. If so-called "low power" poses are so bad for you, why have they survived evolution? Why do we have such strong ingrained impulses to assume them in the first place? "Experts" need to give a very, very convincing answer to this question before urging us to abandon such poses. Anecdotally, I've often been with groups of engineers where everyone was assuming "low power" poses. The discussion seemed to flow more constructively in such circumstances; it was as though everyone admitted that they didn't know the right answers. They felt free to submit very rough ideas because everybody else was just as ignorant and not in a position to shoot them down. Enter a "confident" program manager, however, and the group quickly devolved into silence and/or banalities; everyone felt reluctant to express opinions that they didn't feel completely certain about. [1] http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2012/03/chesterton-fence.html http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2012/03/chesterton-fe...

mamoswined 14y ago
From the perspective of primate social structures, the "low power" poses are incredibly important. For a male chimpanzee who doesn't have the physical strength or social clout to defend himself, adopting a submissive posture in the presence of higher ranking male can mean the difference between being tolerated and being beaten up. In a modern environment, I would hope that your boss would not beat you up for adopting a dominant posture, but it does raise the question about whether or not these can lead to an aggression or submissive behavior from other people in meetings. It might be wiser to neutral pose.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- zeteo 14y ago
  Crouching, having your arms crossed etc. doesn't mean "don't beat me up". Sure, you might not be completely confident, but there's a long way from there to submissive. And, as I mentioned above, is it necessarily such a good social signal to fake confidence all the time?
  - jvm 14y ago
    Noboyd's saying it's defensive, exactly, but I think it is unambiguously a signal that you don't have social ambition in the given context, which makes you unoffensive but also uninteresting.
  - mamoswined 14y ago
    I was discussing their possible evolutionary origins. Hopefully being beaten up is not a possibility in your meetings, but we evolved in an environment where it was until very recently. The whole point of the original article is that such behavior is often unconscious. Crossed arms is an interesting case because I don't think it's a submissive behavior in other primates. It probably is more indicative of boredom, which is probably also not what you want to signal in meetings. I don't really consider myself a dominant or submissive person, but in the past I think my posture and demeanor radiated distraction and boredom. This isn't very inspiring for the rest of the team. I read an article similar to the one there that inspired me to clean up my act.
sliverstorm 14y ago
If so-called "low power" poses are so bad for you, why have they survived evolution? Why do we have such strong ingrained impulses to assume them in the first place? Humans are social animals. In the human social structure, followers are just as important as leaders.
- danielbarla 14y ago
  Indeed, I suspect in some cases it's advantageous to keep your head down, rather than be viewed as a challenger (and get to fight the ranking silverback).
Mz 14y ago
I am female. My behavior is frequently interpreted by other people as extremely aggressive, attention mongering and so on. (Edit: I suspect a lot of it would be interpreted differently if I were male and it would be less of an issue.) It has gotten me loads of extremely negative attention. I have spent many years trying to learn to fly under the radar and deflect attention. This problem began very early in life with being an excessively cute, sunshiny child and continued with being viewed as a beautiful young woman (which came with perks like being raped and told it was my fault for being too beautiful to resist). There are serious downsides to getting attention. Faking confidence when you do not have it and also do not have the ability that it implies can bring real trouble. I still want to figure out how to get traffic for my websites because I think that is my best hope for financial success but I have put a great deal of effort into learning to deflect attention away from me personally. I hope that if my work ever does garner good attention those lessons will stand me in good stead. Lots of celebrities have been seriously burned at some point and had trouble understanding why they were no longer darlings of the public eye. I got to go through that on a much smaller scale. My hope is that it will pay dividends some day when it matters more.
- Yourfags 14y ago
  Are you trying to say you get a lot of attention and don't like it/can't handle it and thus you think being subordinate (low power poses0 is the answer to not being able to cope with things? Come on your argument is that if you fail at something you get burned? There's nothing truer to to life except that we're going to be uncomfortable in it for a long time, but it's easy to ignore if you choose. I understand not wanting to draw attention to yourself, that's a personal thing and a choice only you can really make, but saying "it hurts, I don't want to fly any higher" is never going to change reality, and I think it's sad that someone is posting about life is "forcing" them to do something they don't seem to want.
  - Mz 14y ago
    I didn't say anything like that. You can read remarks by anyone in the public eye about the fact that there is a very real downside to it. For some people the cost is more of a problem than for others. I was simply agreeing with the OP that the situation is not as cut and dried as "dominant behavior good, low status/submissive/nondominant behavior bad."
nate 14y ago
I found this pic interesting: http://blog.bufferapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Screen-Shot-2013-04-17-at-4.50.28-PM.png http://blog.bufferapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Screen-... What I've found recently is I feel like I think better when I scrunch into a position like this. I don't know why, and it's not like my own scientific study. Maybe it's just like going into an isolated place like a shower helps me think better, this type of position seems to as well. I'll cross my arms, and even scrunch my shoulders over. It might even look like I'm in pain. But how many times have you also seen someone say "Let me think", and they might cross one arm over their chest to hold the other arm at the elbow so that arm can rub their head and cover their eyes. So this thesis about these poses being better for power, and confidence is interesting. But I'm curious if there's a lot of usefulness from both.
rdtsc 14y ago
I've read and others have read all these things about body language. Sometimes I play around, in meeting when chatting about boring stuff. I do stuff on purpose. I assume different poses and notice how others react. The funny thing is, I've caught one of the other guys at work he was doing the "on purpose assume a power pose" maneuver. It was the "extend the fingers and then touch the fingers of both hands together". What made if funny to me is that he was doing it so awkward, he didn't feel confident and it wasn't natural. Yes I thought to myself, I probably look the same when I do my power pose or cycle through the fake "lower power" poses.
nandemo 14y ago
Chesterton is talking about social institutions and social change, not unconscious acts and biological evolution. His principle doesn't apply at all here. He's asserting that every long-standing social institution very likely came to exist to serve some purpose, so if one says we should scrap institution X because it's useless, it's likely one is wrong. This has nothing to do with man's biological evolution. In fact we have a myriad of "bad features" (congenital diseases, disabilities, cancer) that have survived evolution.
SilasX 14y ago
>This kind of article doesn't address the issue known as Chesterton's fence [1]. If so-called "low power" poses are so bad for you, why have they survived evolution? That's not hard to explain: most of the selection power of evolution worked in the ancestral, hunters-n-gatherers environment, which covers most of the timespan when anatomically-modern humans lived. Selection modes changed significantly in the agricultural and industrial revolutions, but evolution works too slowly to align our biology ideally with the new environment (plus the local optimum problem). Therefore, it's not uncommon for people to interpret their surroundings by the ancestral mind, even the basis for those "mental adaptations" no longer exist. Indeed, exploiting the difference is the basis for advertising and all other manners of social manipulation. And it's why Snickers bars taste so damn good but are so bad for you. An especially relevant divergence on this topic is in meetings: the kind of things that were genetically optimal among a caveman tribe are very far from the processes that generate productive meeting outcomes. For example, your mind is constantly feeding you rationalizations for why something that happens to benefit you personally, will also benefit the group, even and especially when that is utterly false. So ... I think the appropriate response to claims like the article's, on "Chestertonian" grounds, would be more along the lines of, "If this is so smart, why ain't you(r acolytes) rich?" That is, if people can easily switch to something so much more advantageous, why can't you just as easily prove it with working examples of people you've converted, rather than idly theorizing?

by zeteo 14y ago

mamoswined 14y ago

From the perspective of primate social structures, the "low power" poses are incredibly important. For a male chimpanzee who doesn't have the physical strength or social clout to defend himself, adopting a submissive posture in the presence of higher ranking male can mean the difference between being tolerated and being beaten up. In a modern environment, I would hope that your boss would not beat you up for adopting a dominant posture, but it does raise the question about whether or not these can lead to an aggression or submissive behavior from other people in meetings. It might be wiser to neutral pose.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
zeteo 14y ago
Crouching, having your arms crossed etc. doesn't mean "don't beat me up". Sure, you might not be completely confident, but there's a long way from there to submissive. And, as I mentioned above, is it necessarily such a good social signal to fake confidence all the time?
- jvm 14y ago
  Noboyd's saying it's defensive, exactly, but I think it is unambiguously a signal that you don't have social ambition in the given context, which makes you unoffensive but also uninteresting.
- mamoswined 14y ago
  I was discussing their possible evolutionary origins. Hopefully being beaten up is not a possibility in your meetings, but we evolved in an environment where it was until very recently. The whole point of the original article is that such behavior is often unconscious. Crossed arms is an interesting case because I don't think it's a submissive behavior in other primates. It probably is more indicative of boredom, which is probably also not what you want to signal in meetings. I don't really consider myself a dominant or submissive person, but in the past I think my posture and demeanor radiated distraction and boredom. This isn't very inspiring for the rest of the team. I read an article similar to the one there that inspired me to clean up my act.

sliverstorm 14y ago

If so-called "low power" poses are so bad for you, why have they survived evolution? Why do we have such strong ingrained impulses to assume them in the first place? Humans are social animals. In the human social structure, followers are just as important as leaders.

danielbarla 14y ago
Indeed, I suspect in some cases it's advantageous to keep your head down, rather than be viewed as a challenger (and get to fight the ranking silverback).

Mz 14y ago

I am female. My behavior is frequently interpreted by other people as extremely aggressive, attention mongering and so on. (Edit: I suspect a lot of it would be interpreted differently if I were male and it would be less of an issue.) It has gotten me loads of extremely negative attention. I have spent many years trying to learn to fly under the radar and deflect attention. This problem began very early in life with being an excessively cute, sunshiny child and continued with being viewed as a beautiful young woman (which came with perks like being raped and told it was my fault for being too beautiful to resist). There are serious downsides to getting attention. Faking confidence when you do not have it and also do not have the ability that it implies can bring real trouble. I still want to figure out how to get traffic for my websites because I think that is my best hope for financial success but I have put a great deal of effort into learning to deflect attention away from me personally. I hope that if my work ever does garner good attention those lessons will stand me in good stead. Lots of celebrities have been seriously burned at some point and had trouble understanding why they were no longer darlings of the public eye. I got to go through that on a much smaller scale. My hope is that it will pay dividends some day when it matters more.

Yourfags 14y ago
Are you trying to say you get a lot of attention and don't like it/can't handle it and thus you think being subordinate (low power poses0 is the answer to not being able to cope with things? Come on your argument is that if you fail at something you get burned? There's nothing truer to to life except that we're going to be uncomfortable in it for a long time, but it's easy to ignore if you choose. I understand not wanting to draw attention to yourself, that's a personal thing and a choice only you can really make, but saying "it hurts, I don't want to fly any higher" is never going to change reality, and I think it's sad that someone is posting about life is "forcing" them to do something they don't seem to want.
- Mz 14y ago
  I didn't say anything like that. You can read remarks by anyone in the public eye about the fact that there is a very real downside to it. For some people the cost is more of a problem than for others. I was simply agreeing with the OP that the situation is not as cut and dried as "dominant behavior good, low status/submissive/nondominant behavior bad."

nate 14y ago

I found this pic interesting: http://blog.bufferapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Screen-Shot-2013-04-17-at-4.50.28-PM.png http://blog.bufferapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Screen-... What I've found recently is I feel like I think better when I scrunch into a position like this. I don't know why, and it's not like my own scientific study. Maybe it's just like going into an isolated place like a shower helps me think better, this type of position seems to as well. I'll cross my arms, and even scrunch my shoulders over. It might even look like I'm in pain. But how many times have you also seen someone say "Let me think", and they might cross one arm over their chest to hold the other arm at the elbow so that arm can rub their head and cover their eyes. So this thesis about these poses being better for power, and confidence is interesting. But I'm curious if there's a lot of usefulness from both.

rdtsc 14y ago

I've read and others have read all these things about body language. Sometimes I play around, in meeting when chatting about boring stuff. I do stuff on purpose. I assume different poses and notice how others react. The funny thing is, I've caught one of the other guys at work he was doing the "on purpose assume a power pose" maneuver. It was the "extend the fingers and then touch the fingers of both hands together". What made if funny to me is that he was doing it so awkward, he didn't feel confident and it wasn't natural. Yes I thought to myself, I probably look the same when I do my power pose or cycle through the fake "lower power" poses.

nandemo 14y ago

Chesterton is talking about social institutions and social change, not unconscious acts and biological evolution. His principle doesn't apply at all here. He's asserting that every long-standing social institution very likely came to exist to serve some purpose, so if one says we should scrap institution X because it's useless, it's likely one is wrong. This has nothing to do with man's biological evolution. In fact we have a myriad of "bad features" (congenital diseases, disabilities, cancer) that have survived evolution.

SilasX 14y ago

>This kind of article doesn't address the issue known as Chesterton's fence [1]. If so-called "low power" poses are so bad for you, why have they survived evolution? That's not hard to explain: most of the selection power of evolution worked in the ancestral, hunters-n-gatherers environment, which covers most of the timespan when anatomically-modern humans lived. Selection modes changed significantly in the agricultural and industrial revolutions, but evolution works too slowly to align our biology ideally with the new environment (plus the local optimum problem). Therefore, it's not uncommon for people to interpret their surroundings by the ancestral mind, even the basis for those "mental adaptations" no longer exist. Indeed, exploiting the difference is the basis for advertising and all other manners of social manipulation. And it's why Snickers bars taste so damn good but are so bad for you. An especially relevant divergence on this topic is in meetings: the kind of things that were genetically optimal among a caveman tribe are very far from the processes that generate productive meeting outcomes. For example, your mind is constantly feeding you rationalizations for why something that happens to benefit you personally, will also benefit the group, even and especially when that is utterly false. So ... I think the appropriate response to claims like the article's, on "Chestertonian" grounds, would be more along the lines of, "If this is so smart, why ain't you(r acolytes) rich?" That is, if people can easily switch to something so much more advantageous, why can't you just as easily prove it with working examples of people you've converted, rather than idly theorizing?