Since George Osborne set the trend in 2015, UK Tory politicians have been posing for photos in a legs-too-wide stance laughably called the “power pose.”
I knew a guy who practiced an obscure martial art that allowed him to take a kick to the testes without flinching. This is the exact pose he liked to assume when he was inviting all takers to try it out.
The Tory “power pose” was declining in popularity, but it has been revived by Sajid Javid, who has just been appointed Home Secretary after his predecessor Amber Rudd resigned in disgrace when it was shown that she’d lied to Parliament about deliberately deporting British citizens to the West Indies.
It’s possible that the pols’ are working from Amy Cuddy’s now-debunked research (and its associated Ted Talk).
Back in 2015 the Guardian asked Dr Connson Locke, a leadership and organisational behaviour lecturer at LSE. After she stopped laughing at Osborne’s picture, she told Homa Khaleeli: “All I can think is that he got the advice that you should take up space to demonstrate confidence and he’s taken that to a weird extreme … It doesn’t mean standing with your feet so out of place that you look unnatural.”One possible source is Amy Cuddy. She did a very popular TEDTalk in 2012 that suggested that people adopting “high-power poses” for a couple of minutes a day lead to a measurable difference in how confidently they felt and acted.
Sajid Javid and the return of the Tory power stance
[Martin Belam/The Guardian]
(Image: Toflcoptr/B3ta)
