Skip to content

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. 
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

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. 

Read more here

(h/t HuffPost)

Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

Related
The hospital where Rainn Wilson’s wife and son nearly died became his own personal holy site. There, he discovered that the sacred can exist in places we least expect it. During his talk at A Night of Awe and Wonder, he explained how the awe we feel in moments of courage and love is moral beauty — and following it might be the start of our spiritual revolution.
13 min
with

Up Next