Once the posture test was over the participants received their new statuses and the researchers measured their implicit sense of power by asking them to engage in a word-completion task.

ECONOMIST: How you hold yourself affects how you view yourself

Although previous studies suggested a mere title is enough to produce a detectable increase in an individual's sense of power, Dr Huang and Dr Galinsky found no difference in the word-completion scores of those told they would be managers and those told they would be subordinates.

ECONOMIST: How you hold yourself affects how you view yourself