Amy Cuddy

Leading Expert on Psychology of Power and Influence; Harvard Business School

Meghan Fennell:
617-252-2923
meghan_fennell@monitor.com

The Body Changing the Mind

Recent breakthroughs in behavioral science reveal that minimal manipulations can lead to dramatic outcomes and empower people to become more confident leaders.

Connect, then Lead

Leaders often see themselves as separate from their audiences. They want to establish dominance and be perceived as smart, strong and competent by those around them. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy argues that these are actually not the most important qualities for effective leadership. Instead, the goal should first be to connect.

The Body Changing the Mind

Recent breakthroughs in behavioral science reveal that minimal manipulations can lead to dramatic outcomes and empower people to become more confident leaders. Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School studies how body language affects our thoughts, our feelings and even our hormone levels. A leading social psychologist and pioneer in this field, Amy’s latest research illuminates how “faking” body postures that convey competence and power increases testosterone (the hormone associated with dominance) and reduces cortisol (the hormone associated with stress) levels. “Power posing” for as little as two minutes configures the brain to cope well in stressful situations. These new research findings indicate that, as a result, people feel more powerful, and subsequently:

Are more likely to seek new challenges
Are more willing to take risks
Are better able to manage stress
Peform better at job interviews, in presentations and meetings
Are able to authentically convey enthusiasm, competence and presence

In this provocative speech Amy reveals how minimal manipulations can lead to dramatic outcomes and empower people to become more confident leaders. In short, as David Brooks summarized the findings, “If you act powerfully, you will begin to think powerfully.” At the very least, in this session, you’ll learn how to fake it until you make it.

Connect, then Lead

Amy studies how we form judgments of others along two key variables: warmth and competence. These factors account for about 80 percent of our overall evaluations of people and shape our emotions and behaviors toward them. For the most part, people underestimate the powerful connection of warmth and overestimate the importance of competence. In fact, warmth is the most important interpersonal assessment. It is not only judged first, but accounts for more of someone’s overall evaluation than competence. Somewhat counterintuitive, right?

In this session Amy explores the provocative notion that leaders – from political candidates to business executives to MBA students – often don’t know how to influence the way others perceive them. This presentation will teach attendees how to communicate both warmth and competence (or trustworthiness and power) and understand perceived trade offs between the two. For example, participants will learn

Why the specific content of a message is often less important than how you're communicating it
Why people often are more influenced by how they feel about you than by what you're saying
How connecting first leads to more creative thinking and openness to other ideas and people

Social psychologist Amy Cuddy studies how we perceive and are influenced by other people, investigating the roles of culture, emotions, and nonverbal behaviors. Her research concentrates on judgments of groups and individuals along two core trait dimensions–warmth/trustworthiness and competence/power–and how these shape and motivate our social emotions, intentions, and behaviors. Amy examines how these perceptions and influences shape social interactions, determining such outcomes as who gets hired and who doesn’t, when we are more or less likely to take risks, why we admire, envy, or disparage certain people, or elect politicians. Her most recent work investigates how brief nonverbal expressions of competence/power (“power posing”) actually alter an individual at the biological level and generally configures the brain to cope well in stressful situations.

Amy's research has been published in top academic journals as well as covered on CNN, The New York Times, The Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal. She received the Alexander Early Career Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues in 2008, and a Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science in 2011. Her research was featured in Harvard Business Review's Breakthrough Ideas for 2009 ("Just because I'm nice, don't assume I'm dumb"), Scientific American Mind in 2010 ("Mixed impressions: How we judge others on multiple levels"), and as the cover story in the Nov-Dec 2010 issue of Harvard Magazine ("The Psyche on Automatic").

Amy is an assistant professor in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at the Harvard Business School. She holds a PhD in Psychology from Princeton University and BA in Psychology from the University of Colorado. Prior to joining HBS, she was an Assistant Professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where she taught Leadership in Organizations in the MBA program and Research Methods in the doctoral program; and an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University, where she taught undergraduate Social Psychology.