What Actually Happened to the Power Posing Research
The famous power posing study behind one of the most watched TED talks ever failed to replicate, and its own lead author later disavowed it. Here is what the research actually showed, and what happened after it got famous.
In 2012, a Harvard Business School professor named Amy Cuddy gave a TED talk describing a simple trick, standing in an expansive, chest open posture for two minutes before a stressful situation, that she said could raise testosterone, lower the stress hormone cortisol, and make a person feel and perform as genuinely more powerful. The talk went on to become one of the most watched TED talks ever recorded, and power posing became a fixture of interview prep advice, with people reportedly locking themselves in office bathroom stalls to strike a confident pose before walking into a meeting.
The claim rested on a 2010 study Cuddy published with Dana Carney and Andy Yap in the journal Psychological Science. Forty two participants held either expansive or contractive poses for one minute, then had their hormones measured and were given a gambling task to assess risk tolerance. The posers came out ahead on every measure the researchers checked, more testosterone, less cortisol, and more willingness to take a risky bet. It was a tidy, dramatic result, exactly the kind that travels well.
It did not hold up. In 2015, a much larger and more rigorous replication led by Eva Ranehill, using over two hundred participants instead of forty two, found no effect on hormones and no effect on risk taking, though participants did report feeling somewhat more powerful subjectively. Other labs ran their own versions and mostly came up empty as well.
A separate statistical reanalysis added a further blow. Researchers Joseph Simmons and Uri Simonsohn applied a technique called p-curve analysis to the full body of power posing studies that had been published by that point, a method designed to detect whether a set of significant findings reflects a genuine underlying effect or is more consistent with selective reporting, where studies that failed to find anything simply never got published. Their conclusion was blunt, that the published literature on power posing showed no evidence of a real effect once that selection pressure was accounted for.
A separate statistical reanalysis added a further blow.
Statisticians who later reanalyzed the original data pointed to a familiar culprit behind the initial result, a small sample combined with a flexible set of ways to measure and analyze the outcomes, the kind of setup that reliably produces impressive looking findings that do not survive contact with a bigger, more careful study.
The most striking part of this story is not the failed replication itself, since failed replications are common and not always fatal to a theory. It is what happened next. In 2016, Dana Carney, the study's first author, published a public statement on her own website concluding that she no longer believed the effect was real, citing the small original sample and weak statistical foundation directly. Cuddy did not go as far, and has continued to argue that posture can shift how a person feels in the moment even if the hormonal story does not hold up, but the field largely treats power posing today as one of the clearest teaching examples of what is now called the replication crisis in psychology, a period where a number of famous, made for television findings turned out not to survive being tested again properly.
None of this means posture is irrelevant or that how a man carries himself before a hard conversation does not matter at all. Feeling more settled in your own body before something stressful is a real and reasonable thing to want. What the collapse of this particular study actually demonstrates is narrower and, in its way, more useful than the original claim. There is no two minute hormonal shortcut to genuine confidence, and a body of research that looked airtight enough to justify one of the most viewed talks in TED's history turned out to be built on forty two people and a result that could not be reproduced.
That is a reasonable stand in for how a lot of viral self improvement science actually gets made, and a good reminder to ask what happened after a finding got famous, not just what the finding claimed to begin with. The men most protected from this kind of thing going forward are not the ones who reject every new finding on principle, but the ones who get in the habit of asking a simple question before adopting any confidence hack, whether anyone else managed to get the same result twice.