2019年英语专业八级真题听力 Mini-lecture(2)

I also notice another interesting thing about this. It seems women are much more likely to do this kind of thing than men.

I mean women are more likely to make themselves small. Women feel chronically less powerful than men, so this is not surprising.

The second question concerns our minds. We know that our minds change our bodies.

But is it also true that our bodies change our minds? And when I say minds, in the case of the powerful, what do I mean?

I'm talking about thoughts and feelings and the sort of physiological things that make up our thoughts and feelings, and in my case, that's hormones.

I look at hormones. So what do the minds of the powerful versus the powerless look like?

Powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly, more assertive and more confident, more optimistic. They actually feel that they're going to win even at games of chance.

They also tend to be able to think more abstractly. They take more risks.

So there are a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people. Physiologically, there also are differences on two key hormones: one is dominance hormone, and the other is stress hormone.

What we find is that powerful and effective leaders have high dominance hormone and low stress hormone. What does that mean?