If you want to be more of a risk taker, stand taller. Or at least sit with your back straight while you work. It’s probably a little more complicated than that, but if the results of a study recently published in the British Journal of Psychology, detailed by ScienceDaily, are to be believed, then changing your work surface can alter your willingness to take risks and is linked to changes in how prideful you feel.
Researchers at McGill University reached that conclusion after secretly manipulating how nearly 198 volunteers sat during a lab experiment. Telling participants to possess the posture of a confident person might come off as insulting and would more likely affect the results. Instead, the team adjusted the height of a table with a tablet on it without the participants realizing it. One setup naturally encouraged an upright posture, and the other coaxed people into hunching over.
The participants then played what is essentially a video game about popping balloons that had the absolutely scintillating, ready-for-mass-market name of Balloon Analogue Risk Task, or BART. It’s a psychological test that measures risk behaviors in humans. Originally developed in 2002, the game asks players to click a “Pump” button to inflate a balloon little by little.
Every pump earns the player an amount of in-game currency. The more they pump, the more they earn, while increasing the risk of the balloon popping and losing all the money.
Your Desk Height Could Be Affecting How Much Risk You Take
The researchers found that participants sitting upright generally pumped the balloons more, earning slightly higher rewards without causing significantly more balloon pops. They took risks, but they were calculated. The upright group also had stronger feelings of pride. Posture wasn’t a magic bullet that instantly improved all aspects of a person’s mood, but it made some minor changes here and there, which were perceptible to the researchers as they were able to document a participant’s neck angles while playing a game.
A lot of the volunteers never realized their posture had been intentionally influenced, which is great for the study’s findings because it suggests that the effect wasn’t just that people were acting the way the researchers wanted them to. They did it all on their own, without even thinking about it.
Obviously, none of this means that buying a standing desk will grant you the risk-taking behavior of an Evil Knievel. The results were minor, and the pool of participants was relatively shallow, as it was mostly young Canadian women and it all happened under tightly controlled laboratory conditions.
There aren’t many broad conclusions to draw about the interplay between posture and riskiness just yet, not until there is further research on the subject, but its findings do speak to the ways our environments shape how we think and behave. Something as simple as your desk height might ever so slightly rewire your personality.
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