Recent research has found that a specific manipulation of body postures can influence psychological states associated with power, including an individual’s feeling of power and risk-taking tendency, but the results vary. The purpose of this study is to replicate previous studies. A pilot experiment examined the validity of 10 postures extracted from multiple former studies. Only 4 postures were consistent with former studies. Experiment 1 replicates the study conducted by Carney, Cuddy, and Yap (2010). The results revealed that posture manipulations did not affect the participants’ risk-taking tendency. Experiment 2 is a preregistered experiment to replicate the study of Carney et al. (2010). Different from Experiment 1, data were analyzed with a Bayesian approach. The results of the former study again failed to be replicated, which indicates that the posture manipulations could not yield any effect on both power feelings and individuals’ risk-taking tendency. Thus, we concluded that (a) holding a specific series of body posture perceived as high or low power does not affect individuals’ feeling of power, and (b) holding a specific series of body posture perceived as high or low power does not affect individuals’ risk-taking tendency.

Using a social representations lens, we examined subjective meanings of land entitlements in Central Mindanao among Muslims and Christians. In Study 1, we collected survey data from 231 students from the University of Southern Mindanao in Central Mindanao, asking them: ‘If you were to tell the story of land ownership in Cotabato, what three topics would you want to include in your story?’ Results of our hierarchical evocation analysis show that Christians are concerned with direct conflicts or actual intergroup confrontations while Muslims emphasise land issues. Study 2 implemented Focauldian Discursive Analysis to evaluate two separate focused group discussions by Muslim and Christian village leaders on the question: ‘Who really owns the land in Cotabato, specifically here in Midsayap?’ Findings indicate that Christians hold on to a legal story while Muslims use the ancestral domain narrative to cohere subjective claims to the contested territory. We discuss our results in the light of the role of legalese in an asymmetric territorial conflict and more specifically, the Framework Agreement signed last October 2012 by both the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.