Boost Self Confidence with Good Posture

Sitting up straight gives a good impression and boosts self confidence.

According to research by Ohio State University, having good posture can affect what others think about us and how we think about ourselves.  "Most of us were taught that sitting up straight gives a good impression to other people," says Richard Petty, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State University. "But it turns out that our posture can also affect how we think about ourselves.” 

Petty conducted the study with Pablo Briñol, a former postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State now at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain, and Benjamin Wagner, a current graduate student at Ohio State. The research appears in the October 2009 issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology.

The study included 71 students at Ohio State. When they entered the lab for the experiment, the participants were told they would be taking part in two separate studies at the same time, one organized by the business school and one by the arts school. They were told the arts study was examining factors contributing to people's acting abilities, in this case, the ability to maintain a specific posture while engaging in other activities. They were seated at a computer terminal and instructed to either "sit up straight" and "push out [their chest]" or "sit slouched forward" with their "face looking at [their] knees."  While in one of these positions, students would participate in the business study, which supposedly investigated factors contributing to job satisfaction and professional performance.

While in these positions, students holding their posture listed either positive or negative personal traits relating to future professional performance on job qualifications.  After completing this task, the students took a survey in which they rated themselves on how well they would do as a future professional employee.  The results were striking.

The end result concluded that sitting up straight in your chair can give you more confidence in your own thoughts because the students who were told to sit up straight were more likely to believe thoughts they wrote down while in that posture.   They rated themselves more highly, and if they wrote negative traits about themselves, they rated themselves lower. 

This means, students who held the upright, confident posture were much more likely to rate themselves in line with the positive or negative traits they wrote down.  “Their confident, upright posture gave them more confidence in their own thoughts, whether they were positive or negative,” Petty said.  However, students who assumed the slumped over, less confident posture, didn’t seem convinced by their own thoughts – their ratings didn’t differ much regardless of whether they wrote positive or negative things about themselves.

The end result of this was that when students wrote positive thoughts about themselves, they rated themselves more highly when in the upright than the slouched posture because the upright posture led to confidence in the positive thoughts.  Therefore, sitting up straight is something you can train yourself to do, and it has psychological benefits, as long as you generally have positive thoughts.