Contemporary Digest

It is rare that I buy magazines. I might buy three a year (my subscription to Rolling Stone doesn’t count — it was a Christmas present). But this month’s Scientific American Mind is a special feature issue on Men and Women. I could not resist its pull. And after only a few pages I’m overflowing with questions.

First, go read Stop Slouching! Good posture boosts self-esteem and then come back. I’ll wait. It’s just one paragraph.

If we boil the article down to an outline we get:

1. Your mother told you to sit up straight instead of slouching because “good posture helps you look confident and make a good impression”.
2. College age students were given a task that involved rating their confidence in themselves as job candidates. Those students were told to either “sit up straight with their chests out” or slouch while performing the task.
3. While performing the task, those with better posture rated themselves as more confident than those that slouched.

We are left with the conclusion:

Once again, Mom was right.

The key points appear to be:

• There is some kind of physical/psychological mechanism that accounts for the effect.
• A study shows that this mechanism exists.
• Mom intuitively knows of this mechanism.

But let’s look at it another way:

1. Your mother told you to sit up straight instead of slouching because “good posture helps you look confident and make a good impression”. At a very impressionable age, your mother told you how you should feel when doing a particular thing and then gave her approval when you did it. Approval is important to a child and receiving the approval made you feel good. So you associated sitting up with confidence and this behavoir was reinforced by the good feelings.
2. College age students were given a task that involved rating their confidence in themselves as job candidates. Those students were told to either “sit up straight with their chests out” or slouch while performing the task.
3. Those with better posture rated themselves more confident than those that slouched. Study participants felt better and rated themselves with higher confidence during the task than those that were slouching because they had been conditioned from an early age to associate good posture with confidence, reinforced by approval/good feelings.

The conclusion we are now left with is: Mom must’ve been correct. Mom’s conditioning is the Energizer Bunny, still going strong all these years later.

Did the study validate what mom knows or did it actually show that she did a good job conditioning you?