Analysis Of A Ted Talk 'Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are'

In a Ted Talk “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are” Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist, argues that body language can shape who a person is and how they feel. She proves that body language can determine a person’s life by conducting a scientific experiment. From whether or not someone gets the job to if they get a second date, it is all in how a person communicates with their body. It is almost impossible to prove that this argument is wrong or fallible.
What is body language? Body language is defined as “Movements or positions of the body that express a person's thoughts or feelings” (Merriam-Webster). Cuddy first starts her talk by asking everyone to look at how they are sitting. Are they hunching their shoulders or maybe crossing their legs? Are they stretched out with their legs opened wide? People who feel confident and powerful make themselves bigger, meaning they stretch out, and take up space. People who feel powerless do the opposite. They hunch …show more content…
She states “So we know that our nonverbal govern how other people think and feel about us. There’s a lot of evidence. But our question really was, do our nonverbal govern how we think and feel about ourselves?” She speaks about an experiment that she conducted with a woman named Dana Carney who works at Berkeley. However, before she gets into the specifics of the experiment, Cuddy talks about the physiological changes in people. There are two main hormones: the first being testosterone, which is considered the dominance hormone. The second being cortisol, which is the stress hormone. Now that Cuddy has explained the science, she dives into discussing the experiment. People would come into a lab, spit into a vial, and then for two minutes be positioned in a high-power pose or a low-power pose. After the two minutes are up, each person is asked a series of questions. An opportunity to gamble is given, then another saliva sample is