Because power is something we often avoid discussing openly, its nonverbal communication is fascinating to lay people and psychologists alike. When directly asked, people interpret many different nonverbal signs as indicating high or low power – unfortunately, these ideas are often exaggerated and misguided. Likewise, social psychologists still have no good understanding of the nonverbal cues to power. This article sheds more light on what is actually underlying nonverbal communication of power. We identify two new insights: First, much of the nonverbal communication of power takes places unconsciously and is hard to control. Second, people use abstract schemas to judge power, and they not only apply these schemas to understanding body talk, but also elements of art, advertisement, and architecture.
Most western societies are egalitarian societies. Because the value of equality is held in high regard, Westerners often dislike to talk about, and thereby revealing, who is in charge, who has more to say than others, and who has power (Hofstede, 2001). This makes the nonverbal communication of power and hierarchies, which is present in all societies, all the more important. Which nonverbal cues are associated with power or powerlessness, and where research on this topic is currently going, is the topic of this article.
Lay People Often Get Power Communication Wrong
Nonverbal communication of power seems fascinating to lay people and psychologists alike. For a recent survey of the literature, Judith Hall and her colleagues located 211 studies conducted between 1937 and 2002, and more have been conducted since (Hall, Coats, & Smith LeBeau, 2005). One should suppose that from that many studies, we know already a lot about power. Yet, Hall and colleagues conclude from their survey two uncomforting facts:
1. Lay people probably often see nonverbal communication of power where none is, and over-interpret cues as signalling powereven when they are not diagnostic. For instance, observers interpret smiling, gazing, touching, less pauses, and many other things as indicating power even though Hall and colleagues found little evidence that these signs reliably signal power. Actual relations between power and nonverbal behaviour only existed for more facial expressiveness, more bodily openness, smaller interpersonal distances, less vocal variability, louder voice, more interruptions, and more relaxed sounding voices. Thus, people seem to have somewhat exaggerated views of what communicates power.
2. The studies Hall et al. summarized were very heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory, and we have no good explanations for these contradictions. This indicates that we still know very little about the nonverbal communication of power.
So, the question is: If neither lay people nor social psychologists know all the details about nonverbal communication, how is it that it is actually going so smoothly and effectively? Can we communicate power nonverbally without knowing how we do it? It turns out the answer is yes. New insights into the nonverbal communication of power come from the application of two recent trends in the cognitive sciences. Firstly, a lot of it seems to happen unconsciously, including reactions to it. This may explain why it goes so smoothly, even though actual beliefs about it are often wrong. Secondly, it seems to operate not only with concrete images of how the powerful, or the powerless, behave, but in fact with highly schematized images that are then applied to many things in the environment. In the present article, we will describe some of these recent developments that lift the veil of power'snonverbal communication.
The Automaticity of Nonverbal Power Communication: Portraits, Gaze, and Posture
Let us first investigate how conscious our nonverbal communication of power is. Two recent reviews of nonverbal behaviour in general argued that it largely takes place on automatic, unconscious levels (Choi, Gray, & Ambady, 2005; Lakin, 2006). Two phenomena can serve us as excellent examples because they are unintuitive to most people.
The first example concerns the communication of status by how much of the body in comparison to the face is visible in a portrait. The second example concerns the communication of power by how much one looks at others while speaking. Before you read on, try to think about it: When you look at portraits of persons, do you usually consciously observe how much of the body the portrait depicts in addition to the face? Or, when you talk to your superior, do you consciously register how often he looks at you while he is speaking, compared to when you are speaking? Most people would probably answer that they do that very rarely.
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.
Height and Size
For instance, in an elegant study, Chen, Lee-Chai and Bargh (2001) had their participants sit either in a large professor's chair behind the professor's desk, or in a smaller guest chair across the desk. Sitting in the big chair activated cognitions of havingpower, while the small chair activated cognitions of being powerless. Thus, not only the size of one's body, but also the size of things associated with the own body communicates power.
Our own studies showed also show that this abstraction of nonverbal cues from the body can go very far. For instance, in one experiment, participants formed an impression of a manager whose relations to his subordinates was described in text and visualised in an organization chart (Giessner & Schubert, 2007). One half of the participants saw an organization chart in which the vertical line connecting the box of the manager to the lower boxes of the subordinates was rather short, while the other saw an organization chart with a rather long vertical line. (The structure of the organization chart was the same in both conditions.) The vertical difference determined the perceived power: The longer the line, the more power participants attributed to the manager. Notably, the participants in these studies were students of the business and economic sciences, who should have known that the length of the vertical line has no formalized meaning whatsoever.
In another study, participants judged the power of groups whose labels were shown on the screen (Schubert, 2005). These judgments are very fast, taking less then a second. The labels were placed either on the top or at the bottom of the screen. Even though this vertical location was totally undiagnostic and unimportant for the task, it influenced judgment times: Participants took longer to recognize the powerful groups when they were at the bottom rather than at the top, while the opposite was true for powerless groups. Such an irrelevant vertical location also influences the magnitude of attributed power (Meier, Hauser, Robinson, Kelland Friesen, & Schjeldahl, 2007; Schubert, 2005). Furthermore, schematizing a nonverbal cue in this way also works for size: When the labels of powerful groups are presented in a large font size, the groups are judged more quickly as powerful than when they are presented in a small font size, and the opposite is true for powerless groups (Schubert, Waldzus, & Seibt, 2007). These recent studies fit well with earlier findings demonstrating that actual bodily size, postures that make the body appear larger or smaller, and elevation of position are interpreted as power (Judge & Cable, 2004; Schwartz, Tesser, & Powell, 1982). The larger, the more expanded, and the higher a person is, the more powerful we think that person is. However, these former studies only looked at judgments that were made deliberately and consciously.
Angular and Round Shapes
But size and height are by no means the only stimuli that convey power when they are presented in a schematic fashion. In addition, angular and diagonal shapes such as a downward pointing triangle like a V seem to convey the meanings of potency in combination when compared to round shapes. Thus, a V is perceived to be more potent than an O. Moreover, diagonal shapes are seen as less positive than round shapes. Together, potency and negative evaluation result in the perception of threat (Aronoff, Barclay, & Stevenson, 1988; Aronoff, Woike, & Hyman, 1992).
Summary and Application
In sum, large sizes, elevation, and diagonality, as opposed to smallness, low positions and round shapes, seem to be interpreted and reacted upon as signalling power. The cited research shows that these reactions can also occur automatically and without conscious awareness.
Most interestingly, these features can be part of nonverbal behaviour, but they also work when they are presented separated from the human body, for instance in furniture, fonts, diagrams, art, and architecture. For instance, in some elegant studies, Aronoff and his colleagues have illustrated how angular and circular shapes are contrasted in folk art from all over the world, such as masks, dances, and paintings, to convey conflict and threat. For instance, around the world, ritual masks that embody dangerous spirits or characters feature triangular shapes in the face (Aronoff, 2005). In other words, artists, architects, and advertisers very likely use these schemas to communicate power of the people that they depict in their works, and to influence our perceptions of them. We, as the consumers and observers of their messages, easily pick up the cues, often probably without even noticing them consciously. This, however, does not mean that we have no control over the impression these messages have on us. If we know about the possible influence, if we have the time and mental resources to think about it, and if we care about the impression that is made on us, than we can correct the impression conveyed by the schematic cues of power (Schubert, Waldzus, & Giessner, in press).
Where Do We Learn to Interpret Power Communication Unconsciously?
But one important question is still open: Why exactly do we interpret size, height, and diagonal features as powerful? The jury on this question is still out, and there is not yet a theory that can explain all the cues cited in this article. The most likely interpretation is that we abstract the cues from the experiences we make as children and adolescents: The powerful are typically larger and above us in this time, and this is precisely what makes them more powerful (Schwartz et al., 1982). Moreover, angry faces conveying threat and power display diagonal brows. Some scholars, for instance Alan Fiske (2004), also argue that evolution has equipped us with a preparedness to interpret size and height as power.
But there may never be a complete account of the nonverbal cues that distinguish the powerful from the powerless, because there is no fixed and limited repertoire. Instead, new behaviours may constantly be invented because they serve to create and maintain power. For instance, when people with a highly developed motive to gain social power want to persuade others of their attitude, they actually excel in doing so – and they achieve it by effectively using three nonverbal means: gesturing and eyebrow lifts, in addition to talking very fluently (Schultheiss & Brunstein, 2002). Furthermore, it seems likely that people with a powermotive learn such successful influence tactics because they get a testosterone surge after successfully winning over somebody else (Schultheiss et al., 2005; Schultheiss & Rohde, 2002). In the same manner, people high in power (motive) are likely to acquire all kinds of behaviours that give them what they strive for. Thus, the list of differences in nonverbal behaviours between powerful and powerless is probably never definite.
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