Your Body Language Shapes Who Yo

And there's a lot of reason to believe that this is a valid ['vælɪd] way to look at this. So social scientists have spent a lot of time looking at the effects [ɪ'fɛkt] of our body language, or other people's body language, on judgments ['dʒʌdʒmənt]. And we make sweeping ['swipɪŋ] judgments and inferences ['ɪnfərəns] from body language. And those judgments can predict really meaningful life outcomes like who we hire or promote, who we ask out on a date. For example, Nalini Ambady, a researcher at Tufts University, shows that when people watch 30-second soundless clips of real physician [fɪ'zɪʃən]-patient interactions, their judgments of the physician's niceness predict whether or not that physician will be sued. So it doesn't have to do so much with whether or not that physician was incompetent [ɪn'kɑmpɪtənt], but do we like that person and how they interacted? Even more dramatic [drə'mætɪk], Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates' faces in just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senate ['sɛnət] and gubernatorial [,g(j)uːbənə'tɔːrɪəl] race outcomes, and even, let's go digital, emoticons [ɪ'motɪkɑn] used well in online negotiations [nɪ,ɡoʃɪ'eʃən] can lead to you claim more value from that negotiation. If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right? So when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge others,how they judge us and what the outcomes are. We tend to forget, though, the other audience that's influenced by our nonverbals, and that's ourselves. We are also influenced by our nonverbals, our thoughts and our feelings and our physiology. So what nonverbals am I talking about? I'm a social psychologist. I study prejudice ['prɛdʒədɪs], and I teach at a competitive business school, so it was inevitable that I would become interested in power dynamics. I became especially interested in nonverbal expressions of power and dominance.