magazine issue 2 2008 / Issue 6

The Naked Power: Understanding Nonverbal Communications of Power

• written by Thomas Schubert & Steffen Giessner

Portraits

So, what's up with the ratio of face to body in portraits? Research from the last 25 years has consistently revealed that members of powerful or high status groups (e.g., men, Whites) are portrait in such a way that more of the face, and less of the body, is seen in comparison to portraits of members of powerless groups (e.g., women, Blacks). In addition, portraits of people that show less of the body create the impression that the person is more powerful and competent than portraits that show more of the body, and where the face is less prominent. This has been termed face-ism, a subtle communicative device to uphold powerdifferences in the media (Archer, Iritani, Kimes, & Barrios, 1983; Schwarz & Kurz, 1989; Zuckerman, 1986; Zuckerman & Kieffer, 1994). The effect is also present for the depiction of single individuals. A recent study by Calogero and Mullen (in press) shows that cartoons George W. Bush depicted more of the body, and less of the face, in times when he was perceived as less powerful and less dominant – namely, after he had started wars.

Gaze

Now, let us look at the issue of looking while speaking. The powerful differ from the powerless in how much they look at their interaction partner while speaking. Research on this topic has revealed that the powerful look at their interaction partners more while speaking than while listening, while the powerless look more while listening than while speaking. In addition, people who look more at their interaction partner while speaking are also judged as being more dominant than people who look more while listening. This has been termed visual dominance – and it seems to be a very effective way to communicate and create powerdifferences (Dovidio & Ellyson, 1982; Dovidio, Ellyson, Keating, Heltman, & Brown, 1988).

Posture

However, we have to admit that there is no hard evidence that power is communicated unconsciously this way – we can only suggest that this is true because the finding is unintuitive to most people. Yet, for other forms of nonverbal communication, unconsciousness is shown more directly. The most impressive piece of evidence comes from a study conducted by Tiedens and Fragale (2003). In this study, participants talked to another person while sitting opposite each other. Unknown to the participants, the other person was actually a colleague of the experimenter who, depending on the experimental condition, either sat in an expanded pose (legs and arms outstretched), or in a constricted pose (legs closed, hands on their lap, and slouched). Results showed that the participants mostly displayed complementary behaviour – they constricted their own poses when confronting an expanded person, and they expanded when facing a constricted person. Furthermore, the following study showed that when participants were tricked into sitting either in an expanded or constricted way while facing the confederate, they felt better when they were allowed to take on the complementary posture. Importantly, all of this happened without the participants being aware of their responses and the source of their feelings. Yet, when being asked later, expanded confederates were indeed judged as more dominant than constricted confederates. Thus, participants understood and reacted to nonverbal communication of power through size without being consciously aware of neither the message nor their reaction.

Power Communication Goes Beyond the Body

The behaviours that we just discussed are all directly connected to how the human body nonverbally communicates power. However, nonverbal communication of power is not restricted to expressions of the body alone, and in recent studies social psychologists have collected evidence showing that also these indirect communications take place unconsciously.