Is Your iPhone Turning You Into a Wimp?
The body posture inherent in
operating everyday gadgets affects not only your back, but your behavior.
According to a new study by Maarten Bos and Amy Cuddy, operating a relatively
large device inspires more assertive behavior than working on a small one.
What kind of a device are you using
to read this article? And what does your body posture look like? Are you
hunching over a smartphone screen, arms tightly at your side? Are you slouching
over an iPad or laptop? Or are you stretched out comfortably in an office
chair, scanning a large desktop monitor?
The answer may determine whether
you'll play the wimp or the hero in your next office meeting.
The body posture inherent in
operating everyday gadgets affects not only your back, but your demeanor,
reports a new experimental study entitled iPosture: The Size of Electronic Consumer Devices Affects
Our Behavior.
It turns out that working on a relatively large machine (like a desktop
computer) causes users to act more assertively than working on a small one
(like an iPad).
“We wanted to study how
interacting with a device affected how people behave afterward.”
"People
are always interacting with their smartphones before a meeting begins, thinking
of it as an efficient way to manage their time," says Maarten Bos, a
post-doctoral research fellow at Harvard Business School, who co-wrote the
study with HBS Associate Professor Amy Cuddy. "We
wanted to study how interacting with a device affected how people behave
afterward."
The study is related to previous
experimental research in which Cuddy and colleagues prove the positive effects
of adopting expansive body postures - hands on hips, feet on desk, and the
like. Deliberately positioning the body in one of these "power poses"
for just a few minutes actually affects body chemistry, increasing testosterone
levels and decreasing cortisol levels. This leads to higher confidence, more
willingness to take risks, and a greater sense of well-being, according to the
2010 report by Andy Yap, Cuddy and Dana Carney, "Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect
Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance."
Contractive body postures such as
folded arms have shown the opposite effect, decreasing testosterone and
increasing cortisol. Bos and Cuddy wondered whether there might be behavioral
ramifications from using electronic devices. Looming over his colleagues at six
feet, seven inches tall, Bos must contract his body more than most of us when
operating a laptop, tablet, or smartphone. But many of us constrict our neck
and hunch our shoulders when we use our phones. And statistics show that we use
our phones a lot.
Americans
spend an average of 58 minutes per day on their smartphones, according to a recent report from Experian Marketing Services. Talking accounts for only
26 percent of that time. The other 73 percent is devoted to texting, e-mail, social networking, and web-surfing - in other words,
activities spent hunched over a little screen. (Usage varies according to the
type of smartphone: iPhone users spend an average of one hour and 15 minutes
with their phones each day, with only 22 percent of that time devoted to
talking.)
The
lab experiment
Bos and Cuddy hypothesized that,
compared with smaller devices, interacting with larger devices would lead to
more expansive body postures, which in turn would lead to behaviors associated
with power—including assertiveness and risk-taking behavior. Previous experimental
research had shown that people were more likely to gamble after holding their
bodies in expansive poses and less likely in constrictive poses. Now they
wanted to look into whether behavior was affected during the poses. This might
help to answer questions like: Would people be more likely to join a game of
online poker while using a desktop computer than while using an iPhone? Would
they be more likely to bid higher on an eBay auction when competing to buy a
product?
To test their hypothesis, Bos and
Cuddy conducted an experiment at the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory, a
university-wide research facility for behavioral research. They paid 75
participants $10 each and randomly assigned them to perform a series of tasks
on one of four devices, each successively larger than the next: an iPod Touch
(which looks like an iPhone), an iPad, a MacBook Pro laptop, or an iMac desktop
computer. Each participant sat alone in a room during the experiment, monitored
by a research assistant.
The experiment went like this: After
five minutes of using the assigned device to take an online survey, each
participant was given two dollars, along with the choice of keeping it or
gambling it in a double-or-nothing gambling game with 50/50 odds. Next, the
participant continued with a few other tasks and a final questionnaire, all on
the assigned device.
When the participants were done with
the tasks, the researcher pointed to a clock in the room and said, "I will
get some forms ready for you to sign so I can pay you and you can leave. If I
am not here in five minutes, please come get me at the front desk."
Rather than returning in five
minutes, though, the researcher waited a maximum of ten minutes, recording
whether and/or when the participant had come out to the front desk.
A
beautiful effect
The experiments showed no apparent
effect on the participants' gambling behavior. The majority chose to gamble the
two dollars and to risk taking another card in Blackjack, regardless of which
piece of Apple equipment they were using.
However, device size substantially
affected whether the participant left the room after waiting the requisite five
minutes. Of the participants using a desktop computer, 94 percent took the
initiative to fetch the experimenter. For those using the iPod Touch, only 50
percent left the room.
And among those who did leave the
room, the device size seemed to affect the amount of time they waited to do so.
The bigger the device was, the shorter the wait time. On average, desktop users
waited 341 seconds before fetching the experimenter, for instance, while iPod
Touch users waited an average of 493 seconds.
"The steady increase of waiting
time is locked in step with the size of the device," Bos says. "I
have never before in my life seen such a beautiful effect."
The results indicate that expansive
body postures lead to power-related behaviors, even in cases where the posture
is incidentally induced by the size of the gadget or computer. As for the
difference between the gambling and waiting results, this may indicate that it
takes a little while for body posture to affect behavior. After all, it was the
final task of the experiment that garnered the dramatic results. "So, what
we're thinking now is that you need at least a few minutes of interacting with
a device, or, more importantly, of being in a specific posture related to that
device, before you find effects," Bos says.
However, he says, it will take
additional experiments to determine whether expansive postures are only
effective after the fact. "It may be that power-posing doesn't actually
work during the power-posing, but it works right after," he says,
"Future research will tell."
by Carmen Nobel http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7271.html
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