The Molecule of More

A college student needed to get to the airport to fly home for spring break. 
As with most college students, money was tight, so she made a reservation 
with a shuttle service that would take her to the airport for only $15. The 
shuttle had a regular schedule of stops, and she arranged to be picked up at 
a nearby hotel at 12:30 
pm
.
She didn’t start to get nervous until 1:00. When 1:30 rolled around 
and there was still no car, she knew something was wrong. By 2:00 she was 
beginning to sweat. She had called the service repeatedly, and each time she 
had been assured that “the driver is on his way.” She had declined the door-
man’s friendly offer to call her a taxi, but now she was running out of time.
Thirty minutes and $40 later she stepped out of a taxi at the airport 
and headed straight to the shuttle reservation desk. She demanded that they 
reimburse her for the difference between the shuttle and the taxi. It was 
clearly their fault. They had promised to pick her up at 12:30 and they 
had failed to keep their promise. It wasn’t fair that she should have to pay 
the difference. It was a matter of justice. The clerk at the reservation desk 
had no authority to give her the money, but the woman was so sure she was 
right, that it was inconceivable to her that she would not prevail. It didn’t 
take long before the clerk opened the cash register, and handed over $25.
How does this work? How does a confident expectation of success 
cause others to give way, even when it seems like it’s not in their interest 
to do so? It’s usually because of things that are happening outside of
their conscious awareness.
Researchers from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford 
University wanted to know how subtle, nonverbal behavior affected 
people’s perceptions of one another. They noted that when people 
expand themselves, taking up a large amount of space, they’re per-
ceived as dominant. Conversely, when they constrict themselves, taking 
up as little space as possible, they’re perceived as submissive.
They designed a study to explore the effects of nonverbal displays 
of dominance or submission. The researchers put two people of the 
same sex in a room and asked them to discuss photos of famous paint-
ings. They did this in order to conceal the true nature of the study. 
Only one of the people was an actual test participant. The other was 

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THE MOLECULE OF MORE
a confederate, secretly working for the researchers. The confederate 
assumed either a dominant posture (one arm draped over the back of
an empty chair next to her, legs crossed so her right ankle rested on 
her left thigh), or a submissive posture (legs together, hands in her lap, 
hunched slightly forward). The question was, would the participant 
mirror the confederate’s posture or adopt a complementary, opposite 
posture?
Most of the time, we mirror the actions of people we’re talking to. 
If one person touches his face or gestures with his hands, so does the 
other. But this time it was different. When it comes to dominant and 
submissive postures, the research participants were more likely to adopt 
a complementary posture rather than mirror the same posture. Domi-
nance triggered submission, and submission triggered dominance.
It didn’t happen all the time, though. A minority of participants 
mirrored the confederate. Would that have an effect on the underlying 
relationship? The researchers gave the participants a survey to fill out. 
They wanted to know how they experienced the interaction with the 
confederate. Did they like her? Did they feel comfortable with her? It 
didn’t matter if the confederate took a dominant or submissive pos-
ture. Participants who took the complementary posture not only liked 
the confederates more, they also felt more comfortable with them com-
pared to the participants who mirrored the confederates.
Finally, researchers asked the participants a series of questions to 
find out if they were aware of how they were responding to the confed-
erate. Did they know their posture was being influenced by the posture 
of the other person in the room? It turned out they had no idea. It all 
occurred outside of their consciousness.
We unconsciously know when someone has a high expectation of
success, and we get out of their way. We submit to their will—the over-
whelming expression of their self-efficacy, powered by control dopa-
mine. Our brains evolved this way for a good reason: it’s a bad idea 
to get into fights you can’t win. If you’re picking up signals that your 
adversary has a high expectation of success, the odds are that this is a 
fight you want to avoid. This type of behavior is clearly seen in non-
human primates. Chimpanzees observing a dominant display constrict 

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DOMINATION
themselves to appear as small as possible. On the other hand, when 
chimps respond to dominant displays with mirrored dominant displays, 
it usually marks the beginning of a long period of conflict that often 
ends in violence.
ON ANY GIVEN SUNDAY 
Sports lore is rife with stories about underdogs: the phenom 
overcoming hardscrabble roots, the plucky second-stringers 
who win the championship, the walk-ons who make it to the 
pros—in short, the come-from-behind victory over another 
player, another team, or life itself. Sports movies are almost 
exclusively about this kind of thing: