Social scientists have shown that we make sweeping inferences and judgements based on body language, judgements that can predict meaningful life outcomes like who we hire, who we promote, who we ask out on a date, who we invest in and who we trust. If he doesn’t, we’d better keep our distance, because he’s potentially dangerous, especially if he’s competent. Amy Cuddy shows how your body language influences others and even changes the way you see yourself. Oscar Ybarra and his colleagues found, for instance, that people process words related to warmth and morality (friendly, honest, and others) faster than words related to competence (creative, skillful, and others).3 Why do we prioritize warmth over competence? Because from an evolutionary perspective, it is more crucial to our survival to know whether a person deserves our trust. First we judge warmth or trustworthiness, which we consider to be the more important of the two dimensions. But we don’t value the two traits equally. Amy Cuddy a psychologist,Fascinated with body language.We make inferences and judgments from body languageWhats my body language communicating to you what yours communicating to me and those outcomes can predict meaningful life Outcomes like who we hire, promote, and ask out. The latter is the golden quadrant, because receiving trust and respect from other people allows you to interact well and get things done. Tiziana Casciaro, in her research into organizations, refers to these types as lovable fools or competent jerks.2 Occasionally we see people as incompetent and cold-foolish jerks-or as warm and competent-lovable stars. So we classify new acquaintances into types. We like our distinctions to be clear-it’s a human bias. Her research has been published in top academic journals and covered by NPR, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Wired, Fast Company, and more. Usually we think that a person we’ve just met is either more warm than competent or more competent than warm, but not both in equal measure. Amy Cuddy is a social psychologist and professor at Harvard Business School who studies how nonverbal behavior and snap judgments influence people. “When we meet someone new, we quickly answer two questions: “Can I trust this person?” and “Can I respect this person?” In our research, my colleagues and I have referred to these dimensions as warmth and competence respectively.

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