How Recession Changed USA

Watch in large size by clicking here.o

How Recession Changed USA

Standing Tall Is Key for Success in 2011

Show enthusiasm, ask questions and bring copies of a resume. These are just a handful of the most common interview tips for job seekers, but a person’s posture may also be a deciding factor for whether they land a coveted position – even when the person on the other side of the desk is in a more powerful role.

According to new research from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, posture plays an important role in determining whether people act as though they are really in charge. The research finds that “posture expansiveness,” or positioning oneself in a way that opens up the body and takes up space, activates a sense of power that produces behavioral changes in a person independent of their actual rank or hierarchical role in an organization.

More importantly, these new findings demonstrate that posture may be more significant to a person’s psychological manifestations of power than their title or rank alone. Led by Kellogg School of Management professor Adam Galinsky and Kellogg PhD candidate Li Huang, along with Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Deborah Gruenfeld and Stanford PhD candidate Lucia Guillory, this research is the first to directly compare the effect on behavior of having a high-power role versus being in a high-power posture. The paper is titled “Powerful Postures Versus Powerful Roles: Which Is the Proximate Correlate of Thought and Behavior?” and appears in the January 2011 issue of Psychological Science.

Although not anticipated by the researchers, they consistently found across three studies that posture mattered more than hierarchical role – it had a strong effect in making a person think and act in a more powerful way. In an interview situation, for example, an interviewee’s posture will not only convey confidence and leadership but the person will actually think and act more powerfully. “Going into the research we figured role would make a big difference, but shockingly the effect of posture dominated the effect of role in each and every study,” Huang noted.

“The December 5, 2005 cover of the New Yorker is a classic example for how indicative posture can be in determining whether people act as though they are in charge,” said Galinsky, the Morris and Alice Kaplan Professor of Ethics and Decisions in Management. “The image depicts the power relationships between former President George W. Bush – shown with an apron, feather duster, and a slouched, constricted posture – while former Vice President Dick Cheney has both arms expansively extended across the back of a sofa, his legs sprawled across a coffee table. When hierarchical role and physical posture diverge like this, posture seems to be more important in determining how people act and think.”

To test their theory, Galinsky, Huang and co-authors conducted three experiments to explore the effects of body posture versus role on power-related behaviors. The first two experiments demonstrated that when individuals were placed in high- or low-power roles while adopting expansive (i.e. open) or constricted (i.e. closed) body postures, only posture activated power-related behaviors. In the expansive posture condition, participants were asked to place one arm on the armrest of a chair and the other arm on the back of a nearby chair; they were also told to cross their legs so the ankle of one leg rested on the thigh of the other leg and stretched beyond the leg of the chair. Conversely, in the constricted posture condition, participants were asked to place their hands under their thighs, drop their shoulders and place their legs together.

During various tasks such as a word completion exercise and a blackjack game, participants with open body postures were thinking about more power-related words and generally took more action than those with closed body postures. Although people in a high-power role reported feeling more powerful than did those in a low-power role, the manipulation of role power had little effect on action. These findings demonstrate that role and posture independently affect participants’ sense of power, but posture is more responsible for activating power-related behaviors.

In a third experiment, the researchers demonstrated that posture also has a greater effect on action than recalling an experience of being in a high- or low-power role. Participants verbally recorded a time when they were in a high- or low-powered position while adopting either expansive or constricted body postures, and were then asked whether they would take action in three different scenarios. Participants in the expansive body posture condition took action more often than those with constricted postures, regardless of whether they recalled a time of being in a high- or low-powered role.

According to Galinsky, the role of powerful postures is important for those seeking new jobs in 2011. “With 1.9 million new jobs on the horizon this year, our research suggests that your posture may be quite literally the way to put your best foot forward in a job interview,” said Galinsky.

o

Standing Tall Is Key for Success in 2011

Eleven Digital Trends for 2011

Eleven Digital Trends to Watch in 2011

View more presentations from Edelman Digital.

o

Eleven Digital Trends for 2011

Consumers prefer products with few, and mostly matching, colors

Most people like to play it safe when combining colors for an article of clothing or outfit, a new study suggests.When consumers were asked to choose colors for seven different parts of an athletic shoe, they tended to pick identical or similar colors for nearly every element. They usually avoided contrasting or even moderately different color combinations.

A red and yellow athletic shoe?  Not going to happen.  Blue and grey?  That’s more like it. This is one of the first studies to show how consumers would choose to combine colors in a realistic shopping situation, said Xiaoyan Deng, lead author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business. The results support the theory that people like their color combinations to be relatively simple and coherent, rather than complex and distinct.

“Most people like to match colors very closely,” Deng said.  “The further the distance between two colors, the less likely people are to choose them together.” However, there was one exception.  A large minority of people chose to highlight a relatively small signature part of the shoe with a contrasting color far from the colors used in other elements. Overall, though, the study showed that people prefer a simple design with few colors.  While participants could choose from up to 16 colors for different parts of the shoe, the average person only used about four colors on the entire shoe they designed.
“Using a small number of colors simplifies the final design and reduces the effort it takes to design the shoe,” Deng said.
Deng conducted the study with Sam Hui of the Stern School of Business at New York University and J. Wesley Hutchison of theWharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.  It was published in a recent issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology.
The study is important, Deng said, because it is one of the first to show, from a marketing perspective, people’s preferences for color combinations.  Most other research on color preferences has taken a psychological perspective and simply asked people whether they thought two color chips would go well together.
“We had a very realistic situation in the study where consumers could clearly show how they would combine colors in real life,” Deng said. The study involved 142 participants who agreed to go to the publicly available NIKEiD website and create a Nike “shox” shoefor themselves.  At the site, they choose colors for seven elements of the shoe: the base, secondary, swoosh, accent, lace, lining and shox.  For each element, they could choose between six to 12 colors. The researchers analyzed the color choices made by the participants and measured the similarity of chosen colors based on a widely accepted “color space” model.


Results showed there was a strong tendency to use identical colors in more than one of the seven different elements of the shoe, Deng said.  When the participants did use different colors, they were almost always very closely related.  For instance, “ice blue” might be combined with “twilight blue.”
But a large minority of people did choose to highlight one element of the shoe by making it a color that was unrelated to the others used, offering a strong contrast.  Often, people chose this contrasting color for the “shox” element – columns in the heel and mid-section of the shoe that provide cushioning while running.

These shox are a unique component of athletic shoes and a signature component of this Nike product line. “It seems that some consumers wanted this signature part of the shoe to really stand out from the rest,” Deng said.  “It may be that they saw the rest of the shoe as a background for this one contrasting color.  But we need to study that more.”
Deng said it was significant that consumers used only about four different colors in the shoe.  The researchers calculated that they would expect consumers to use 5.48 colors per shoe, based on the conditions in this study.
“We found that consumers preferred to use just a small palette of colors in their shoe and closely matched colors within this palette,” she said. But does this study really capture the participants’ general feelings about color combinations, or are the results only applicable to these self-designed shoes?
To test this, the researchers asked participants to rate how much they liked four Nike-designed shoes available on the website. The researchers then created a “color coordination index” for each Nike-designed shoe that allowed them to relate the level of similarity between colors of a specific Nike-designed shoe to participants’ shoe preferences.
The results showed that there was a strong association between the color coordination index and the liking for Nike-designed shoes.  This suggests the study really did reveal how participants liked to combine colors, Deng said.
Deng said the findings suggest that Nike may be offering more color combinations for each element of the shoe than consumers really need.
“If a consumer chooses a reddish color for one element of the shoe, he or she will probably only use colors closely related to red for the rest of the shoe,” she said. “However, it is not the case that you can offer the same small palette of colors for all consumers.  Each consumer may have a different idea of what color they want to emphasize.  But once they make that choice, their palette tends to be restricted.”

o

Consumers prefer products with few, and mostly matching, colors

The Future of Starbucks

o

The Future of Starbucks

Gesturing While Talking Helps Change Your Thoughts

Sometimes it’s almost impossible to talk without using your hands. These gestures seem to be important to how we think. They provide a visual clue to our thoughts and, a new theory suggests, may even change our thoughts by grounding them in action. University of Chicago psychological scientists Sian Beilock and Susan Goldin-Meadow are bringing together two lines of research: Beilock’s work on how action affects thought and Goldin-Meadow’s work on gesture. After a chat at a conference instigated by Ed Diener, the founding editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science, they designed a study together to look at how gesture affects thought. 

For the study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Beilock and Goldin-Meadow had volunteers solve a problem known as the Tower of Hanoi. It’s a game in which you have to move stacked disks from one peg to another. After they finished, the volunteers were taken into another room and asked to explain how they did it. (This is virtually impossible to explain without using your hands.) Then the volunteers tried the task again. But there was a trick: For some people, the weight of the disks had secretly changed, such that the smallest disk, which used to be light enough to move with one hand, now needed two hands. People who had used one hand in their gestures when talking about moving the small disk were in trouble when that disk got heavier. They took longer to complete the task than did people who used two hands in their gestures—and the more one-handed gestures they used, the longer they took. This shows that how you gesture affects how you think; Goldin-Meadow and Beilock suggest that the volunteers had cemented how to solve the puzzle in their heads by gesturing about it (and were thrown off by the invisible change in the game). 

In another version of the experiment, published in Perspectives in Psychological Science, the volunteers were not asked to explain their solution; instead, they solved the puzzle a second time before the disk weights were changed. But moving the disks didn’t affect performance in the way that gesturing about the disks did. The people who gestured did worse after the disk weights switched, but the people who moved the disks did not—they did just as well as before. “Gesture is a special case of action. You might think it would have less effect because it does not have a direct impact on the world,” says Goldin-Meadow. But she and Beilock think it may actually be having a stronger effect, “because gesturing about an act requires you to represent that act.” You aren’t just reaching out and handling the thing you’re talking about; you have to abstract from it, indicating it by a movement of your hands. 

In the article published in Perspectives in Psychological Science, the two authors review the research on action, gesture, and thought. Gestures make thought concrete, bringing movement to the activity that’s going on in your mind. This could be useful in education; Goldin-Meadow and Beilock have been working on helping children to understand abstract concepts in mathematics, physics, and chemistry by using gesture. “When you’re talking about angular momentum and torque, you’re talking about concepts that have to do with action,” Beilock says. “I’m really interested in whether getting kids to experience some of these actions or gesture about them might change the brain processes they use to understand these concepts.” But even in math where the concepts have little to do with action, gesturing helps children learn—maybe because the gestures themselves are grounded in action.

o

Gesturing While Talking Helps Change Your Thoughts

Advertising spending

The Economist reports that  global spending on advertising will grow by 4.5% in 2011, double the rate of the previous year...

o

Advertising spending