Tilting your head to the right makes you suspicious: The effect of head tilting on social cognition, risk taking, and critical thinking

  • Sugimoto A
  • Honmoto S
  • Sugamura G
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Abstract

Tilting your head toward the right or left shoulder may indicate that you may be doubtful about something. Eighty-two undergraduates were asked to assume three head positions: (a) right tilt, (b) left tilt, and (c) upright, in counterbalanced order, by looking into a hole at different angles in a box. The results indicated that when tilting to the right, they were likely to judge a socially desirable person to have less commitment toward his/her job (p=.002, d=0. 9). It was also found that men were more willing to take a risk when they tilted their head to the left, than when it was upright (p=.014, d=0. 8). There was no effect on logical thinking. Our hypothesis that head-tilting would trigger more elaborate information processing was supported only when their heads were tilted to the right in an interpersonal situation. We attributed this for people being apt to tilt their heads to the right by nature. Conversely, left-tilting facilitated more careless behaviors, perhaps because it was often an awkward posture. However, the findings were not contradictory overall, if we were to modify our hypothesis so that right-tilting would enhance carefulness. Future research may be needed to consider individual differences in head posture.

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APA

Sugimoto, A., Honmoto, S., & Sugamura, G. (2016). Tilting your head to the right makes you suspicious: The effect of head tilting on social cognition, risk taking, and critical thinking. THE JAPANESE JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, 55(2), 150–160. https://doi.org/10.2130/jjesp.si1-1

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