How Relevant are Incidental Power Poses for HCI?

TY - GEN

T1 - How Relevant are Incidental Power Poses for HCI?

AU - Jansen, Yvonne

AU - Hornbæk, Kasper

PY - 2018/4/20

Y1 - 2018/4/20

N2 - The concept of power pose originates from a Psychology study from 2010 which suggested that holding an expansive pose can change hormone levels and increase risk-taking behavior. Follow-up experiments suggested that expansive poses incidentally imposed by the design of an environment lead to more dishonest behaviors. While multiple replication attempts of the 2010 study failed, the follow-up experiments on incidental postures have so far not been replicated. As UI design in HCI can incidentally lead to expansive body postures, we attempted two conceptual replications: we first asked 44 participants to tap areas on a wall-sized display and measured their self-reported sense of power; we then asked 80 participants to play a game on a large touch-screen and measured risk-taking. Based on Bayesian analyses we find that incidental power poses had little to no effect on our measures but could cause physical discomfort. We conclude by discussing our findings in the context of theory-driven research in HCI.

AB - The concept of power pose originates from a Psychology study from 2010 which suggested that holding an expansive pose can change hormone levels and increase risk-taking behavior. Follow-up experiments suggested that expansive poses incidentally imposed by the design of an environment lead to more dishonest behaviors. While multiple replication attempts of the 2010 study failed, the follow-up experiments on incidental postures have so far not been replicated. As UI design in HCI can incidentally lead to expansive body postures, we attempted two conceptual replications: we first asked 44 participants to tap areas on a wall-sized display and measured their self-reported sense of power; we then asked 80 participants to play a game on a large touch-screen and measured risk-taking. Based on Bayesian analyses we find that incidental power poses had little to no effect on our measures but could cause physical discomfort. We conclude by discussing our findings in the context of theory-driven research in HCI.

U2 - 10.1145/3173574.3173588

DO - 10.1145/3173574.3173588

M3 - Article in proceedings

SN - 978-1-4503-5620-6

SP - 1

EP - 14

BT - CHI '18 Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

PB - Association for Computing Machinery

T2 - 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2018

Y2 - 21 April 2018 through 26 April 2018

ER -