New research from Harvard implies that consumerization and BYOD can have an impact on how staff behaves. Carmen Nobel at HBS Working Knowledge wrote about research from post-doctoral research fellow Maarten Bos and Associate Professor Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School. They claim Your iPhone is Turning You Into a Wimp.
The research says that in an experiment, people who had been using smartphone-sized iPod Touch devices were 47% less likely than desktop users to get up to try to find out why a researcher hadn’t come back after leaving the room to fetch paperwork so that participants could be paid. And of those who did take action, the iPod Touch users took 44% longer than desktop users to get up and look for the researcher. The research suggests that your hunched posture as you use a smartphone-sized device for just a few minutes makes you less likely to engage in power-related behaviors than people who have been using desktop computers.
The researchers claim that body posture inherent in operating everyday gadgets affects not only your back but your demeanor. A new study entitled iPosture: The Size of Electronic Consumer Devices Affects Our Behavior. It turns out that working on a larger machine causes users to act more assertively than working on a small one (like an iPad).
The study proves the positive effects of adopting expansive body postures – hands on hips, feet on the desk, and the like. According to the article, deliberately positioning the body in a “power pose” for just a few minutes actually affects body chemistry. They increase testosterone levels and decrease cortisol levels. This leads to higher confidence, and more willingness to take risks. According to a 2010 report by Andy Yap, Cuddy, and Dana Carney good posture leads to a greater sense of well-being,
Contractive body postures like folded arms have the opposite effect. Contractive body postures decrease testosterone and increasing cortisol. Bos and Cuddy wondered whether there might be behavioral ramifications from using electronic devices. The author says that many of us constrict our necks and hunch our shoulders when we use our phones. And statistics show that we use our phones a lot.
Americans spend an average of 58 minutes per day on their smartphones, according to a recent report from Experian Marketing Services. Talking accounts for only 26 percent of that time. The other 73% is devoted to texting, e-mail, social networking, and web-surfing – in other words, activities spent hunched over a little screen.
Bos and Cuddy hypothesized that interacting with larger devices would lead to more expansive body postures. That in turn would lead to behaviors associated with power—including assertiveness and risk-taking behavior.
To test their hypothesis, Bos and Cuddy paid 75 participants $10 each and randomly assigned them to perform a series of tasks on one of four devices, each successively larger than the next: an iPod Touch, an iPad, a MacBook Pro laptop, or an iMac desktop computer. Each participant sat alone in a room during the experiment, monitored by a research assistant.
When the participants were done with the tasks, the researcher pointed to a clock in the room and said, “I will get some forms ready for you to sign so I can pay you and you can leave. If I am not here in five minutes, please come get me at the front desk.” Rather than returning in five minutes, though, the researcher waited a maximum of ten minutes, recording whether and/or when the participant had come out to the front desk.
The article reports that device size substantially affected whether the participant left the room after waiting the requisite five minutes. Of the participants using a desktop computer, 94 percent took the initiative to fetch the experimenter. For those using the iPod Touch, only 50 percent left the room.
And among those who did leave the room, the device size seemed to affect the amount of time they waited to do so. The bigger the device was, the shorter the wait time. On average, desktop users waited 341 seconds before fetching the experimenter, for instance, while iPod Touch users waited an average of 493 seconds.
“The steady increase of waiting time is locked in step with the size of the device,” Harvard’s Bos says. “I have never before in my life seen such a beautiful effect.” The results indicate that expansive body postures lead to power-related behaviors. This happens even in cases where the posture is incidentally induced by the size of the gadget or computer. Mr. Bos concludes that a break from your mobile phone is needed to be powerful, “... you need at least a few minutes of interacting with a device, or, more importantly, of being in a specific posture related to that device, before you find effects.”
In the meantime, the article suggests it may be a good idea to avoid the smartphone immediately before your next big meeting. Texting up until the boss starts speaking may make you look busy, but it may make you act meek. “We won’t tell anyone not to interact with those devices just before doing something that requires any kind of assertiveness,” Bos says. “Mostly because people won’t listen: They will do it anyway...”
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Professor Cuddy’s power poses theory says that certain body stances, such as standing with your legs apart and your hands on your hips, or opening up your chest area, bathe your cortex in testosterone, a hormone associated with assertiveness and the willingness to take risks. Meanwhile, they also reduce cortisol, the stress hormone. On the other hand, low power poses—crossing your arms over your chest, say, or bunching your shoulders—increase neural levels of cortisol and reduce testosterone, resulting in more stress and less confidence.
Does this have implications for BYOD? The evidence seems to indicate that staff seeking advancement will gravitate toward tablets. Offering a larger device to a normally shy worker will make them more assertive.
Look around the office do your observations match the researcher’s implications?
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.