Embodied Cognition: Which Posture Makes Us Reckless and Dishonest?
“Power causes you to focus on rewards and take risks to achieve those gains,” Dr. Andy Yap of MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
The image above depicts a woman sitting in both an “expansive” and a “contractive” car seat during a simulated driving experiment. With less room, the woman and her fellow test subjects are good drivers, and indeed good citizens, a study found. However, when sitting with an expansive posture, people are more likely to drive recklessly and, in other scenarios, they are more likely to cheat and act dishonestly.
The key link, according to researchers, is between posture and the feeling of power. “Power causes you to focus on rewards and take risks to achieve those gains,” Dr. Andy Yap of MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
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