Power Poses May Do More Harm Than Good

Standing in a ‘powerful’ position – with a broad posture, hands on hips, shoulders high and pushed back – does not make you feel psychologically and physiologically stronger and could potentially backfire, a new study has found. The idea that standing in power poses helps is intuitively appealing, especially for people without much confidence. The problem is that it is simply not true, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in the US said. They attempted to replicate the power pose study that appeared in 2010 in the journal Psychological Science. It reported increases in feelings of power, risk taking and testosterone and a decrease in cortisol. The Penn researchers found no support for any of the original effects, what is called embodied cognition. They did find that if anything – and they’re skeptical of these results, because they’d want to replicate them – that,

if you’re a loser and you take a winner or high power pose, your testosterone decreases.

'Nice' Women Earn Less Than Their Assertive Peers

The nicer or more agreeable a woman is at work, the lower her salary is likely to be, a new study has claimed. Researchers from Tel Aviv University and University of Haifa are Israel, examined status inconsistencies between men and women through the lens of traditional male and female characteristics. Dominant, assertive women, who clearly express their expectations and do not retreat from their demands, are compensated better than their more accommodating female peers. According to the researchers, the same goes for dominant men versus their more conciliatory male counterparts – but even dominant women earn far less than all of their male colleagues. Researchers have witnessed dramatic changes in the definition of traditionally male and female qualities over the past several decades. They found that women are not aware that more agreeable women are being punished for being nice. The nice women they polled in their study even believed they were earning more than they deserved. For the purpose of their study, the researchers surveyed 375 men and women at a Dutch electronics company with 1,390 employees. The subjects were selected at random from all 12 of the company departments.