Abstract
Adopting physical expressions of emotion has feedback effects on individuals’ mood and behaviour; for example, adopting the expansive and contractive body language of dominance and submission can affect individuals’ feelings of power. However, postural feedback paradigms almost exclusively use deliberate, active posture manipulations, which raise concerns about experimental demand effects and limit the ecological validity of the research. Here, we addressed this issue by creating an incidental manipulation of posture in which the experimental environment encouraged participants to take on either an expansive or contractive posture, and measured the effect of our manipulation on self-report and behavioural outcomes. We find that our manipulation reliably increases risk-taking behaviours (as measured by the balloon analogue risk task), an effect which is robust to confounding variables such as discomfort with the posture or awareness of the manipulation. Furthermore, posture effects on self-reported pride are partially mediated by a measure of participants’ posture during the experiment (the angle of their neck), while risk-taking effects are moderated by posture and self-reported mood during the experiment. Our results suggest that aside from deliberate ‘power posing’, incidental factors which affect posture in the real world (e.g., standing desks or ergonomic setups) may have impacts on individuals’ behaviour.