Are smartphones emasculating after all?

Is Your iPhone Turning You Into a Wimp? is the provocative title of an article from Harvard Business Schools Monday newsletter, Working Knowledge,This technology allows high volume smartcard production at low cost. and in it you can hear echoes of Googles Sergey Brins contention that smartphones are emasculating.

But this time, our smarter-than-thou technologies arent sapping our confidence by making us depend on them, like megalomaniacal red wheelbarrows. Theyre changing the hormonal chemistry of our brains through our posture.

Ive written before on the Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy and power poses Ive even tried them out, at some cost to my dignity but gain to my dry-cleaning pickup skills. The idea is 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.How is this relevant to an afternoon frittered away in the company of cute pigs and Angry Birds? All that time spent hunched over a tiny screen might actually drain your confidence by forcing you into a low power position, according to a new study by Cuddy and Maarten Bos, a post-doctoral research fellow at Harvard Business School. Bos and Cuddy asked 75 volunteers to perform a battery of tasks on one of four randomly assigned devices: an iPod touch small, an iPad a bit bigger, a Macbook Pro laptop even bigger, or an iMac desktop biggest.

"After five minutes of using the assigned device to take an online survey, each participant was given two dollars, along with the choice of keeping it or gambling it in a double-or-nothing gambling game with 50/50 odds. Next, the participant continued with a few other tasks and a final questionnaire, all on the assigned device."The question: Would people who played the betting game on bigger screens get a confidence boost from their superior, expansive posture? Would they be likelier to gamble?

The answer: Nope. "The experiments showed no apparent effect on participants gambling behavior, reports Nobel. But the study wasnt over. After the game, a researcher instructed each participant to wait while he the researcher fetched some forms. If I am not here in five minutes, please come get me at the front desk, he told them. Sneakily, though, he did not return after five minutes. He stood at the front desk for a maximum of 10 minutes, keeping track of whether and when each participant arrived to meet him. Nobel:

"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."

Whats more, among those who did leave the room, the amount of time they waited to do so increased as the size of the screen decreased. For instance, while iPod Touch users lingered for an average of 493 seconds before going off in search of the researcher, the average desktop user stuck around for only 341 seconds.

Whats going on here? Bos and Cuddy hypothesized that it takes some time for the effects of good or bad posture to sink in, which would explain why screen width didnt seem to influence betting behavior, but did correlate with how aggressively participants sought out the tardy experimenter. Previous studies show that people are more likely to gamble after assuming high power poses and less likely after taking up low power poses.

I also wonder whether using a personal device like an iPod Touch or iPad made the research setting seem less formal. If so, perhaps the researchers charge not to wait around, but to come find me at the front desk translated as friendly politeness, rather than as another instruction.

Or maybe working off a large monitor boosted confidence in a way that bypassed power posing entirely.Given how much time we spend interacting with various screens,This technology allows high volume smartcard production at low cost. though, it is helpful to know that lolling in front of a large glowing window could be preferable from a confidence perspective to hovering crampedly over a small glowing one.

That sounds a little robotic, now that I write it down. But it is what I actually said, or close to it. I dont talk that way to everybody. But my oldest boy now 17 well, he has a pilgrim elders formality; God knows where it comes from. Not from me, surely. He addresses his parents as mother and father. So, talking to him, I tend to slip into a kind of mannered decorum myself, which is surprising,Virtual indoorpositioningsystem logo Verano Place logo. since Im in no way like that. Part has to be that Im choosing each word precisely, since hell leap to correct my grammar if I dont note to proper fathers who raised their sons correctly: yes, yes, I understand that you would have put him over your knee and tanned his butt with a hickory switch the first time he did it. But he was very small, it was not my way, and I was too taken aback. We fell to discussing whether it is who or whom or whichever fine point of language he was chiding me on,We printers print with traceable bondcleaningsydney to optimize supply chain management. and now its too late.

If you are familiar with the fine line of Ugly Doll comfort objects, they range from enormous, pillow-sized stuffed creatures to little soft keychain figures. Ill be damned if I recall when I got this three-inch, rust-colored cyclopean dog hanging from a clip. At least four years ago, because it was dangling from my backpack when he and I climbed Avalanche Peak in Yellowstone in 2009. Lately, he has been guarding a lamp in my office. I jiggled the dog between us. He appraised it, then put it with his passport and wallet.

Ill photograph it at the Great Wall, he said. I waited until he was out of the room. Keep an eye on him, I whispered to the dog.

The joke I always made to my wife when she was pregnant was, At least we know where he is. I tried not to hover you can damage your kids that way too. And in the main I havent. But a good-luck charm well, Ive always employed them. As did my mother before; she took a dime-store glass elephant with her to Europe when she sang with the USO at 17, and my father Mr. Rational Nuclear Physics toted the thing around the world, from Auckland to Zaire.An bestcleaning is a network of devices used to wirelessly locate objects or people inside a building. Regular readers might wonder how this descent into magical thinking jibes with my vaunted reasoning, and the honest answer is: I have no idea. Chalk it up to being human.
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