Power Posing After the Alarm: What 42 People and Then 200 Showed

“That a person can, by assuming two simple 1-min poses, embody power and instantly become more powerful has real-world, actionable implications.” So ends the abstract of Carney, Cuddy and Yap (2010) in Psychological Science. Morning advice grew from sentences like that one: stand like a superhero for two minutes and you will feel and act like someone who is already up.

A power pose will not wake you up, and the two parts of the claim have fared differently. The feeling of being more powerful survived a larger replication (Ranehill et al., 2015). The testosterone, cortisol and risk-taking results did not, and the first author of the original paper has said she no longer believes they were real.

What the 2010 study did

Forty-two participants, 26 women and 16 men, were randomly assigned to a high-power or low-power condition. An experimenter positioned each person’s body into two poses, one minute each. Participants were told the study concerned where electrocardiography electrodes sat relative to the heart. They viewed nine faces during the poses as a filler task.

Afterward each person was handed $2 and offered a choice: keep it, or roll a die with 50/50 odds to either lose it or win $4. They also rated how “powerful” and “in charge” they felt, from 1 to 4. Saliva was collected before posing and again about 17 minutes later, for testosterone and cortisol.

The reported results, all from the 2010 paper:

• Testosterone: high-power posers rose, low-power posers fell, F(1, 39) = 4.29, p < .05.
• Cortisol: the reverse pattern, F(1, 38) = 7.45, p < .02.
• Risk: 86.36% of high-power posers took the gamble against 60% of low-power posers, chi-square(1, N = 42) = 3.86, p < .05.
• Felt power: M = 2.57 against 1.83, F(1, 41) = 9.53, p < .01.

Sessions ran between 12:00 and 6:00 p.m. The paper does mention waking up, once, as an example of a short-term cortisol rise that helps with a challenge. It never tests anyone who has just woken.

What 200 people did

Ranehill, Dreber, Johannesson, Leiberg, Sul and Weber (2015, Psychological Science, 26(5), 653-656) ran a conceptual replication with 200 participants, 98 women and 102 men. Their power analysis put the chance of detecting an effect the size Carney reported at more than 95%.

They changed several things on purpose or by necessity. Each pose was held three minutes instead of one. Instructions came by computer, so the experimenter did not know which pose a participant held. The filler task built words from letters. The consent form told participants that physical position and hormones were under study, with no cover story. Their risk task had six safe-versus-gamble choices in the gain domain, where Carney used one, plus a matching set in the loss domain and a choice about entering a competitive math tournament.

The results from the paper, two-tailed t tests:

• Felt power: mean difference 0.245, 95% CI [0.044, 0.446], t(193) = 2.399, p = .017, d = 0.344.
• Risk in the gain domain: p = .215.
• Testosterone change: p = .162.
• Cortisol: p = .272.
• Loss-domain risk and willingness to compete: no significant differences.

The scorecard

Claim	Carney et al. 2010 (N = 42)	Ranehill et al. 2015 (N = 200)	Status
Feel more powerful	Yes, p < .01	Yes, p = .017	Replicated, smaller
Testosterone rises	Yes, p < .05	No, p = .162	Not replicated
Cortisol falls	Yes, p < .02	No, p = .272	Not replicated
Takes more financial risk	Yes, p < .05	No, p = .215	Not replicated
Competes more	Not tested	No	No evidence
Tested on people who just woke	No	No	Unknown

On felt power, the effects point the same way but differ in size. Carney’s r = .44 converts to a d of roughly 0.98 (my arithmetic, using the standard conversion), against 0.34 in Ranehill. A small first study overshooting a later large one is the usual pattern when a result is shrinking toward its true size.

A fair referee should also give the original authors their due. Ranehill’s team wrote that subtle differences in protocol, such as pose length, the cover story, or the filler task, could explain the gap, and that more research is needed to identify what conditions an effect would need. They tested the pose-length worry by reanalyzing only participants who rated the poses comfortable, and results held. They did not rule out every difference.

What the original author said later

In a 2016 statement, Dana Carney wrote: “I do not believe that ‘power pose’ effects are real.” She also listed choices in the 2010 work. Risk-taking was the main outcome of interest, and subjects were run in chunks (she recalled “something like 25 subjects run, then 10, then 7, then 5”) while checking the result along the way. Five participants were excluded, leaving 42. For the risk result, a Pearson chi-square gave p = .052 and a likelihood-ratio test gave .05, and the smaller was reported. Many power questions were asked, and she says those that “worked” were the ones kept. She also notes that experimenters knew the hypothesis, and that participants were told right after the gamble whether they had won, which can raise testosterone by itself.

Cuddy, Schultz and Fosse (2018, Psychological Science) replied with a p-curve of 55 studies and argued it showed evidential value for postural-feedback effects, strongest for emotional and affective states. I could read only the title and secondary summaries of that paper, not the full text. Simmons and Simonsohn disputed the analysis on the Data Colada blog, and Credé (2019) argued that most pooled studies compared expansive poses only with contracted ones. The reasonable reading is that a mood effect remains an open question and hormones and risk are not supported.

What to do in the first two minutes instead

Nothing here says posing harms you. If it makes you feel somewhat more capable, that matches the one result both studies found, and it costs nothing. What the evidence does not support is a posture working as the thing that gets a person out of bed, changes their hormones, or makes the day’s decisions better.

A narrower finding applies to the minutes after waking. A structured review by Hilditch, Dorrian and Banks (Industrial Health, 2016) found no convincing evidence base for any countermeasure you can use after waking, which is covered in what researchers found when they tested wake-up hacks. A pose belongs in that same category: an add-on to being upright.

So the practical order is short. Get out of bed first. Pose after, if you like it. Another famous result that shrank on a closer look is told in the marshmallow test replication story, and a related point about belief and sleep is in a study that told people they had slept badly.

Why the decision at the alarm is a different problem

A posture acts on how you feel once you are already upright. The decision that costs people their mornings happens earlier, lying down, with a thumb over a button. A feeling reported on a 4-point scale cannot settle that, and the self-report is precisely the measure that survived. Self-report is also the weakest kind of evidence about whether a habit happened, a point made in the commitment-device ranking of video proof against self-report.

A consequence works on the decision itself. DontSnooze is one version: if you do not film yourself up within the window, your friends receive a photo from your camera roll. Nobody has run a Ranehill-style trial on that, so it rests on the commitment-device literature and not on a replication of its own.

Neither paper asked whether a two-minute pose changes whether someone gets up. They asked about hormones and gambles in the afternoon, and for those the larger study says no.