A recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found a connection between an individual’s natural body posture and their personality traits. Researchers discovered that how a person habitually stands—when not influenced by external factors—reflects their attitudes toward dominance, submission, and social hierarchy. Importantly, this relationship appears stable over time, suggesting that the way a person naturally stands might be a consistent reflection of their underlying personality.
For centuries, body posture has been viewed as an essential part of emotional and social communication. Charles Darwin, for instance, emphasized the role of body language in emotional expression. While many studies have looked at temporary body language—how someone stands or moves during a specific interaction—there has been less research on whether everyday, habitual body posture carries meaningful information about a person’s personality. The researchers aimed to answer this question by investigating whether natural posture correlates with stable personality traits.
“Many studies have previously investigated how adopting a specific posture (e.g., expansive vs. contractive in the ‘power posing’ paradigm) can change people’s social perceptions, interactions, and even their own mood and behavior,” said study authors Soren Wainio-Theberge and Jorge L. Armony of McGill University. “In psychology, we call this a ‘state’ variable—something that changes from moment to moment or day to day, like your mood. People also vary in terms of stable, ‘trait’ characteristics, such as personality. We were interested in assessing whether, in addition to its effects on state variables, natural body posture (i.e., posture when they’re not doing anything in particular) could also reflect a trait which would relate to specific personality characteristics.”
To examine whether natural body posture is a stable trait that reflects deeper personality characteristics, the researchers conducted a series of five studies.
In the first study, 421 participants were recruited, but after quality checks, data from 369 participants were analyzed. They were asked to take four photos of themselves in a natural standing position: from the front, back, left, and right. These photos were analyzed using a machine-learning tool called OpenPOSE, which detected key body points and calculated angles related to their posture, including angles of the neck, shoulders, spine, and hips.
Along with the posture assessment, participants completed a comprehensive set of personality questionnaires. These included scales measuring traits like social dominance orientation, psychopathy, empathy, anger control, and other relevant socio-affective dimensions.
The results revealed a significant relationship between an upright, erect posture and certain personality traits. Participants who naturally stood with a more upright posture, characterized by a straight neck and an open body stance, were more likely to exhibit personality traits associated with dominance, competitiveness, and antisocial tendencies. Specifically, these individuals scored higher on social dominance orientation and primary psychopathy, while scoring lower on empathy and anger control.
“We were surprised that antisocial traits were most consistently associated with posture, rather than depression and negative emotion,” Wainio-Theberge and Armony told PsyPost. “Previous studies in clinical depression have found more hunched postures in depressed patients, and while we saw some evidence for that in our data, antisocial traits were far more consistent.”
In the second study, the researchers aimed to test whether the posture-personality relationship observed in Study 1 reflected stable, trait-like behavior or if it varied over time. To do this, they conducted a follow-up study with a subset of 107 participants from the original sample. These participants repeated the posture assessment five weeks after the initial session.
The results showed that participants’ postures remained stable over the five-week interval. The angles of their neck, shoulders, and other key body points stayed consistent across both sessions, indicating that natural posture is not just a transient state but a stable individual trait. The posture-personality relationship observed in Study 1 was also replicated in this follow-up study.
The third study sought to directly test whether the natural upright postures observed in Study 1 could be interpreted as dominant postures. In this study, 104 participants were asked to adopt specific dominant and submissive poses. They were provided with no additional instructions besides being told to assume a “dominant” and a “submissive” pose, with the order counterbalanced across participants.
The researchers used logistic regression to develop a classifier that could distinguish between the dominant and submissive postures based on the postural angles measured in the photos. This classifier was then applied to the natural posture data from Study 1 to classify participants’ natural stances as either dominant or submissive.
The results confirmed that the upright, erect postures observed in Study 1 were indeed interpreted as dominant postures. Participants’ dominant poses were characterized by open, upright body positions, with a straight neck and forward-leaning hips, while submissive poses were more closed off, with slumped shoulders and a lowered head. The classifier was able to distinguish dominant from submissive poses with an average accuracy of approximately 75%, with 76.3% accuracy for dominant poses and 73.8% for submissive ones.
When applied to the natural postures from Study 1, the classifier confirmed that those classified as having dominant postures also scored higher on the antisocial personality traits identified in the first study. This finding reinforced the interpretation that habitual upright posture is associated with social dominance and hierarchy-related personality traits.
In the fourth study, the researchers aimed to explore the physiological underpinnings of the posture-personality relationship by measuring muscle activity in participants while assessing their natural posture. The study included 129 participants, and the researchers focused on two key neck muscles: the sternocleidomastoid (a muscle involved in head and neck movement) and the upper trapezius (which helps stabilize the shoulders and neck).
Surface electromyography (EMG) was used to record muscle activity while participants were seated and at rest. This data was then correlated with the posture components identified in Study 1. Additionally, participants completed the same personality questionnaires as before, and their natural postures were again assessed using the photogrammetric approach.
The physiological measurements revealed that individuals with more upright postures showed increased muscle activity in the sternocleidomastoid, the neck muscle responsible for keeping the head elevated. However, there was no significant correlation between posture and the upper trapezius muscle activity. This suggests that the upright posture associated with dominant personality traits may be actively maintained through specific muscle engagement, particularly in the neck.
Importantly, the researchers also replicated the posture-personality relationship observed in earlier studies, confirming that individuals with more upright postures continued to score higher on dominance-related personality traits, even in an in-person setting.
For their final study, the researchers aimed to further explore the relationship between natural posture and personality traits by expanding the range of personality measures used. They recruited 125 participants. Participants were asked to take photos of their natural standing posture, and these images were analyzed using the same photogrammetric techniques as in earlier studies. In addition to the personality scales used in previous studies, this study included measures of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and aggression to explore a wider array of antisocial traits.
The findings showed that individuals with more erect postures scored higher on traits such as Machiavellianism, primary psychopathy, and hubristic pride, all of which relate to a desire for power and the use of manipulative or aggressive strategies to achieve social dominance. The results of Study 5 reinforced the idea that natural body posture reflects stable personality characteristics, particularly those related to dominance and hierarchy.
However, the researchers noted that “it is important to emphasize that our study is observational; that is, we observed a correlation between body posture and personality and therefore cannot make inferences about causality. In other words, people should NOT take away that standing upright will change your personality (for better or for worse).”
“One take-home message from our study is that body posture is not only important for physical health, but it also reflects (as mentioned, whether it plays a causal role or not remains to be determined) relevant aspects of our personality, particularly those related to social interactions. Thus, together with findings from studies on the psychological effects of transient body poses, it highlights the importance, and benefits, of paying attention to our bodies in our daily life.”
But as with any study, there are some limitations. The sample was predominantly drawn from a university setting in Canada. It remains unclear whether the same patterns would hold in a more diverse population, particularly among older adults or those from different cultural backgrounds. Future research should aim to replicate these findings in more varied populations to ensure their generalizability.
“The usual caveat in this kind of research is the sample—we studied young adults, most of whom were university students and the vast majority of whom self-identified as women,” Wainio-Theberge and Armony told PsyPost. “While we recently extended this to a wider age range (up to 80 years old), there’s a lot of variability in the population at large that we’re not capturing in this study.”
Additionally, while the researchers found a connection between posture and personality, their measurements focused primarily on postures related to dominance and submission. Future studies could explore whether other postural characteristics, such as slouching or leaning, are associated with different personality traits, such as introversion or anxiety.
“The long-term goal would be to extend this research to other aspects of personality,” the researchers said. “Body language is multifaceted and conveys lots of signals besides dominance and submission, so there’s no reason to expect that posture-personality relationships should be limited to this dimension. With more advanced methods, which we are currently developing, we might be able to pick up on other posture-personality relationships.”
The study, “Differences in natural standing posture are associated with antisocial and manipulative personality traits,” was authored by Soren Wainio-Theberge and Jorge L Armony.
