Power Posing Never Replicated
Amy Cuddy's TED talk claimed a two-minute pose changes your hormones. A larger, blind replication found no such thing — and one of the study's own co-authors now says she doesn't believe it either.
The claim, from Amy Cuddy’s 2012 TED talk (one of the most-watched in the platform’s history): hold an “expansive” pose, hands on hips, chest open, feet planted wide, for two minutes before a stressful moment, and your testosterone rises, your cortisol drops, and you perform better. It doesn’t hold up. The hormonal and behavioral effects never replicated, and one of the original study’s own co-authors has since said publicly she doesn’t believe them.
That co-author is Dana Carney, of UC Berkeley, who ran the 2010 study with Cuddy and Andy Yap. In 2016 she posted a statement online: “I do not believe that ‘power pose’ effects are real.” She pointed to a 2015 paper in Psychological Science by Eva Ranehill and colleagues at the University of Zurich, which reran the experiment with 200 participants, five times the original sample, using a blind design so the experimenters didn’t know who’d posed which way. It found no measurable change in testosterone, cortisol, or risk-taking. A 2017 special issue of Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology, devoted to the question, gathered several more attempts; none recovered the original effects.
One piece survived: people who posed did report feeling somewhat more confident afterward. So the subjective effect has some support; the biological mechanism Cuddy built the talk around does not.
Power posing usually gets recommended as a pre-alarm or pre-meeting ritual, something to do alone before the day starts asking things of you. It joins a small pile of rituals — vision boards among them — that feel like preparation without doing the work preparation is supposed to do. Standing differently for two minutes changes how you feel for a few minutes. It doesn’t change your blood chemistry, and it isn’t a substitute for whatever actually needs to happen next.