Desk setups that encourage an expansive posture may boost risk-taking

A recent study published in British Journal of Psychology suggests that people’s physical posture, even when influenced naturally by their environment, can affect their mood and willingness to take risks. The findings indicate that environments forcing individuals into a more upright, expansive position might subtly encourage riskier decisions compared to settings that cause them to hunch over.

The concept of embodied emotion suggests that adopting the physical expressions of an emotion can trigger the experience of that emotion. For instance, power poses involve making the body expansive and upright to signal dominance, while contractive postures involve hunching and taking up less physical space to signal submission.

Early research claimed that deliberately holding expansive body postures boosts feelings of dominance and leads to riskier decisions, according to a widely cited 2010 study. However, major replication efforts, such as a high-profile 2015 replication, failed to find any change in risk-taking from deliberate power posing. This sparked a debate over whether the original findings were genuine or simply the result of people guessing what the experimenters wanted them to do.

Subsequent research showed that subtly guiding people into specific postures without explicitly telling them how to pose still alters their mood and cognitive performance, as seen in a 2021 study. Relatedly, a study covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that naturally standing more upright is associated with higher levels of social dominance orientation. This progression led researchers to ask a new question: can an incidental manipulation of posture, where the physical environment naturally nudges someone into a stance, influence risk-taking behavior without them knowing it?

The research, led by Soren Wainio-Theberge of McGill University, aimed to test this question. The researchers recruited 198 participants, mostly young women, and randomly assigned them to two different experimental groups. An additional 113 participants, recruited as part of a different project, were included to serve as a control group.

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The study utilized an incidental posture manipulation, meaning that instead of instructing participants to sit a certain way, the researchers altered the physical environment. Participants sat at an adjustable table to complete a computerized task on a tablet. For the expansive group, the table was raised and the tablet was placed on a stand slightly above eye level, prompting an upright posture. For the contractive group, the table was lowered to near knee level, forcing participants to hunch over to see the screen.

To measure risk-taking, participants completed the Balloon Analogue Risk Task. In this task, participants earn virtual money by pumping up a digital balloon. Each pump adds virtual money to a temporary pot, but if the balloon pops, the money for that round is lost, requiring participants to decide when to cash out and bank their earnings or take the risk of another pump.

The researchers also recorded participants with a video camera to objectively measure their actual neck angles, ensuring they were genuinely adopting the intended postures. Finally, participants completed questionnaires about their mood and feelings of pride before and after the task.

The environmental manipulation successfully changed participants’ postures without most of them realizing it. Video analysis confirmed that those in the expansive group sat with a more extended, upright neck angle compared to the hunched posture of the contractive group. Most participants later reported having no idea that their posture was being manipulated by the setup.

In terms of behavior, the expansive group exhibited higher levels of risk-taking. As the experiment progressed, participants in the expansive group chose to pump the balloons more times before cashing out compared to those in the contractive group. This increase in risk-taking translated to slightly higher overall earnings for the expansive group, averaging 701 virtual dollars compared to 645 in the contractive group, without an increase in the number of balloons that actually popped.

When comparing the results to the control group, who completed the task at a standard desk setup, the researchers noticed that the expansive group drove the behavioral differences. The expansive group took more risks than the control group, while the contractive group behaved similarly to the controls. Physical posture also influenced emotional states, with a more upright neck angle predicting a stronger sense of self-reported pride after the task.

These results stand in tension with a 2017 study covered by PsyPost, which found that deliberate power posing had no beneficial effects on risk-taking in real-world situations. However, the new study induced posture subtly through environmental setup rather than instructing participants to hold deliberate poses, which may account for the differing behavioral outcomes.

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relied primarily on young, female university students from a single Western country. This specific demographic means the findings might not naturally apply to older adults, males, or people from other cultural backgrounds where social dominance is expressed differently.

Allowing participants to adopt postures naturally in response to their environment also created physical variability. In the contractive group, some people dropped their heads to look at the screen, while others leaned forward from the hips. This inconsistency makes it harder to pin down exactly which physical movements drive the changes in mood and behavior, suggesting a need for future studies to track body mechanics in greater detail.

The study, “Manipulating posture implicitly through environmental constraints influences mood and risk-taking behaviour,” was authored by Soren Wainio-Theberge and Jorge Armony.