Basic body language may be all you need to spot a master manipulator in seconds, a new study shows.
Psychologists conducted five separate studies analyzing a total of 608 subjects. This found a consistent link between those who often stand upright in open, expansive postures and ‘antisocial and manipulative personality traits’.
The discovery adds a new twist to the debate over the ‘power pose’, a wide-legged, chest-forward pose that was once believed to give a confidence boost to those who strike it.
“We were surprised that antisocial traits were most consistently associated with posture,” the study authors said, “rather than with depression and negative emotion.’
The team suspects that this preference may reflect an unconscious “use of intimidation to increase one’s access to resources in the environment at the expense of others.”
“Previous studies of clinical depression have found more stooped postures in depressed patients,” the McGill University researchers explain.
“And while we saw some evidence of that in our data,” they noted, “antisocial traits were much more consistent.”
Researchers suspect that the preference for tall posture may reflect an unconscious ‘use of intimidation to increase access to resources in the environment at the expense of others’
In the first study, subjects were asked to complete a personality survey and submit four photos of their natural pose from different angles: front, back, left and right.
The photos were then analyzed through a machine-learning tool called OpenPOSE, which identified key body points – the placement or angle of the neck, eye line, shoulders, spine and hip – to add measurable numbers to their pose.
In the second study, the relationships found were double-checked, while in the third, 104 participants were asked to deliberately adopt dominant and submissive postures, based on their own subjective interpretation, to further verify this.
At this point, the team found that participants who naturally adopted a ‘power posture’ scored higher on having a ‘social dominance’ orientation.
These subjects also scored higher ‘primary’ or more likely genetic psychopathywhile also scoring lower on both empathy and anger management.
“The usual caveat to this type of research is the sample,” Wainio-Theberge and Dr. Armony added. “We studied young adults, most of whom were college students and the vast majority of whom self-identified as women.”
“While we recently expanded this to a broader age range, up to 80 years,” they said PsyPost‘There is a lot of variability in the population as a whole that we do not map in this study.’
Psychologists at McGill University tracked their subjects to find a link between antisocial or psychopathic traits (x-axis above) and each subject’s attitudes (y-axis above)
Photos of the subjects were analyzed via a machine-learning tool called OpenPOSE, which identified key body points (shown in figure d, above) and calculated angles to add measurable numbers to their posture, such as angles of the neck, shoulder, spine and hip placement
The team’s fourth study added a physiological and neurological element, recording muscle activity related to two major neck muscles in 129 subjects.
A surface electromyography (EMG) device was used to monitor one muscle used in head and neck movements, tthe sternocleidomastoid, and another that helps stabilize the shoulders and neck, the upper trapezius.
The McGill team found that the head and neck connector, sternocleidomastoid, played a much stronger role in what is commonly considered a ‘dominant’ posture.
Their fifth and final study, published along with the rest in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Last November they tried to look for links between attitude and other related traits, ‘Machiavellianism’ [manipulation]narcissism and aggression.’
These results strengthened the link between posture and personality, showing that more upright postures were adopted among participants who had a greater desire for power and were willing to pursue manipulative or aggressive strategies to get what they wanted.
But the researchers noted that this should not be interpreted as an excuse to faint.
“People should NOT take away from the fact that standing up straight will change your personality (for better or worse),” they said.
“We observed a link between posture and personality and therefore cannot draw any conclusions about causality,” they explained.
University of Massachusetts Amherst psychologist Dr. Susan Krauss Whitbourne reviewed only the McGill study and acknowledged that there are still some insights for the average person to gain from this research.
“A person who seems to want to use his body to intimidate you (even if he doesn’t quite succeed),” she wrote in Psychology Today, “seems like a good person to stay away from.”