Amy Cuddy’s TED talk on power poses has been viewed 37 million times. For comparison purposes, Kanye West’s video “Famous,” which features naked celebrities in bed together, has been viewed 21 million times. Cuddy’s talk is the second-most-watched video in TED history, behind only Ken Robinson’s “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” — and, at its current pace, will eventually take over the No. 1 spot, thereby making power poses the most popular idea ever on the most popular idea platform.
The talk led to a book, Presence, which was published a year ago by Little, Brown and became a best seller. For the promotional tour, Cuddy, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, popped up on an impressive list of television shows, including Good Morning America, Today, Morning Joe, and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. She received the sort of publicity roll-out usually reserved for celebrities. And why not? Cuddy had become a celebrity in her own right. In Presence, she writes about getting recognized in airports and snapping selfies with fans. They spot her and immediately strike a power pose — feet apart, hands on hips, head thrown back. “Hey! It’s TED girl!” they cry.
As scientific ideas go, power poses could hardly be more clickable. For starters, it’s simple to understand: Standing like Wonder Woman or in another confident pose for two minutes is enough, Cuddy informs us, to transform a timid also-ran into a fierce go-getter. Even better, this life hack comes straight from an Ivy League professor who published her findings in a peer-reviewed journal bolstered by charts and percentages and properly formatted citations. This wasn’t feel-good conjecture; this was rock-solid research from a bona fide scientist.
What went unmentioned on those shows, however, was that the study supporting Cuddy’s claims had begun to crumble. Well before the publication of her book, another research team had tried and failed to replicate the most-touted finding — that assuming a power pose leads to significant hormonal changes. In addition, the intriguing discovery that power poses made subjects more willing to take risks seemed dubious. In the wake of the apparent debunking, online science watchdogs sank their teeth into the study, picking apart its methodology and declaring its results risible.
Then, in late September, one of Cuddy’s co-authors, Dana Carney, did something unusual: She posted a detailed mea culpa on her website, siding with the study’s critics. “I do not believe that ‘power pose’ effects are real,” wrote Carney, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley’s business school. Her note went on to say that, while the research had been performed in good faith, the data were “flimsy” and the design and analysis, in retrospect, unsound. She discouraged other researchers from wasting their time on power poses.
So how did arguably the most popular idea on the internet end up on the scientific ash heap? For that matter, how could such questionable research migrate from a journal to a viral video to a best seller, circulating for years, retweeted and forwarded and praised by millions, with almost no pushback? The answer tells us something about the practice and promotion of science, and also how both may be changing for the better.
There are two ways to evaluate the impact of a scientific paper. One is to count the number of times it gets cited by other researchers. By that metric, the 2010 power-poses paper by Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy, and Andy Yap is a middling success: 478 citations, according to Google Scholar. That’s not bad — most studies attract little or no notice — but Cuddy herself has co-written half-a-dozen papers that rank higher in the citation index. Power poses didn’t set the academic world on fire.
Another way to judge a paper is to examine the effect it has on the broader culture. Does it resonate with people who don’t have advanced degrees or campus parking spots? By this less-quantitative standard, power poses was a smash.
Before the paper was published in the journal Psychological Science, an article about power poses appeared in Harvard Business School’s alumni bulletin. It emphasized Cuddy’s role in the research, even though she was not the first author on the paper, and even though the research had been conducted at Columbia University, where Carney and Yap were based. “Our research has broad implications for people who suffer from feelings of powerlessness and low self-esteem due to their hierarchical rank or lack of resources,” Cuddy said at the time. The headline was “Fake It Until You Make It.”
A bigger boost came when David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and author of books like The Social Animal, about the everyday uses of psychology, visited the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory, where Cuddy is a researcher. He described in a column how the power-poses experiment showed that the testosterone levels of subjects who stood in “high-power positions” for only two minutes increased significantly while their cortisol levels dropped. Testosterone is associated with assertiveness and risk-taking, though the causal link between the hormone and behavior is complicated. Cortisol is known as the stress hormone. “If you act powerfully,” Brooks aptly summarized, “you will begin to think powerfully.”
A shout-out from Brooks is a coup for any researcher hoping to goose his or her public profile. But the power-poses study was still building steam.
In 2011, Cuddy appeared at PopTech, a TED-ish conference that bills itself as a “global community of innovators, working together to expand the edge of change.” Like TED, the presentations are energetic, the topics eclectic, and the tickets — at $2,000 each — pricey. Cuddy appeared alongside speakers like Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former dean of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and current president of the New America think tank, and Reggie Watts, the musician and comedian. When her turn came, Cuddy stood on stage in front of a jumbo screen showing Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman while that TV show’s triumphant theme song announced the professor’s arrival (“All the world is waiting for you! And the power you possess!”). After the music stopped, Cuddy proceeded to explain the science of power poses to a room filled with would-be innovators eager to expand the edge of change.
PopTech, though, was merely a warm-up gig for Cuddy’s 2012 breakthrough performance at TedGlobal, an offshoot of the annual flagship TED conference. Though the science remained the same — hormones, risk-taking primate hierarchies — the tone was more inspirational. There were no Wonder Woman theatrics this time around. She promised the audience that power posing was a “free, no-tech life hack” that would work for anyone who had ever struggled with self-confidence. Cuddy also shared the story of when, during college, she had been in a car accident that left her with a traumatic brain injury. Doctors told her that she would need to lower her expectations, but she proved them wrong, completing her undergraduate degree and moving on to graduate school in psychology at Princeton. While all of this happened more than a decade before the idea of power poses burst onto the scene, Cuddy drew an implicit connection between her own journey and the technique guaranteed to empower everyone who employed it.
A professor’s book became a best seller just as the research behind her claims was crumbling.
The talk ended with a rousing call to spread the gospel of power poses far and wide. “The people who can use it the most are the ones with no resources and no technology and no status and no power,” she told the TedGlobal assembly. “They need their bodies, privacy, and two minutes, and it can significantly change the outcomes of their life.”
And share it they did. The reviews on Twitter brimmed with superlatives: brilliant, awesome, fantastic. They quoted pithy lines from her talk, such as “Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes.” Thousands commented on TED’s site and on YouTube and Facebook: “Best Ted Talk ever? I think so,” said one. Another: “This will change ur life NOW.”
The advance for her book based on the talk reportedly topped $1 million and Cuddy signed on with the Washington Speakers Bureau, where sought-after personalities can pull in $40,000 or more per event. Business Insider named Cuddy one of the “50 women who are changing the world.” In a 2014 profile published in The New York Times, Cuddy shrugged off those who sneered that she was getting rich from telling people to sit up straight. “I don’t care if some people view this research as stupid,” she said. “I feel like it’s my duty to share it.”
Eva Ranehill was intrigued by power poses. Ranehill, a postdoctoral student in economics at the University of Zurich, had studied gender differences in risk-taking and competitiveness between boys and girls in an attempt to understand and, ideally, combat stereotypes. Maybe, she thought, body posture could play a role in overcoming the gender gaps she had observed.
She decided to give it a go. The design of Ranehill’s study mostly mirrored the original, though there were a few changes. For instance, in the original study, subjects were told how to stand by the experimenters; in the Ranehill study, the instructions were given, by a computer, a less-personal approach intended to eliminate any accidental influences. Also — and this was the biggest difference — Ranehill’s study put 200 subjects through the experiment, more than four times as many as the original.
Ranehill didn’t get the same results. Not even close. Testosterone didn’t go up, cortisol didn’t go down. Standing in a power pose didn’t cause people to take more risks in a gambling game. Ranehill hadn’t set out to undermine power poses; she had wanted to build on the idea. But after trying and failing with 200 subjects, it was obvious that something was amiss. “We started talking to others who had done studies on power poses, and it was clear we were not the only ones who couldn’t replicate it,” she says.
Ranehill was disappointed, if not entirely surprised. She knew that in recent years the field of social psychology had been dealing with growing suspicions about the reliability of some of its best-known and most exciting findings. Last year an attempt to replicate 100 randomly selected psychological studies, an effort led by Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science, found that fewer than half passed the test. It wasn’t so much a case of a few rotten apples, as some hopeful observers had claimed, but rather an entire barrel gone bad. One of the main culprits of this sorry state of affairs is thought to be sample size. Too few subjects means there’s a much greater chance that a seemingly significant result is just noise in the data.
Andrew Gelman wrote about the Ranehill study last year in Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, the deceptively dull title of his often-irreverent blog. Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University and director of the university’s Applied Statistics Center. He’s taken it upon himself as a sort of hobby, or perhaps a mission of mercy, to expose and correct what he sees as glaring ineptitude in psychological studies.
One problem Gelman has zeroed in on repeatedly is researcher freedom. There’s too much of it, he says. When conducting a study, researchers get to decide which data to exclude, how to code data, and how to analyze the data they produce. They’re also at liberty to alter their theory to comport with any outcome. When you’re not sure exactly what you’re looking for, it’s tempting to seize on some effect — illusory or not — and proceed to manufacture a narrative about why it matters. Choose what works and discard the rest.
After the book tour was over, one of the paper’s co-authors, who had been silent, tore into her own methodology.
This is sometimes called “p-hacking,” a reference to p-value, a tool used to determine a study’s statistical significance. Gelman doesn’t like that term, because he thinks it implies that researchers are intentionally skewing their results. In some cases they are: Psychology has been shown to have its share of charlatans. But in most cases, he believes, researchers are fooling themselves, too. That’s why he prefers the less disparaging and more poetic phrase “garden of forking paths,” borrowed from the title of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. Scientists are, in Gelman’s formulation, leading themselves down the wrong path.
And it happens constantly. You can hear the exasperation in his voice when he talks about the number of flawed studies that worm their way into the pages of seemingly respectable journals. “Once you’re aware of it, you start seeing it everywhere,” he says. “It’s like when you’re in New York City and you look around, you don’t notice anything, but when you start looking down at the ground, you see rats everywhere.”
Gelman counts power poses among the vermin. “I feel like I care more about the effect of power poses than Amy Cuddy does, in some way, in that I actually care if it really works,” he says. “And I don’t think it does.”
When Cuddy made the rounds on television, the failed Ranehill replication wasn’t discussed. That’s understandable. What affable talk-show host is going to delve into a disquisition on sample sizes and p-values? Besides, the mainstream appeal of power poses has always hinged on the fact that, while the results had been verified by a Harvard scientist, the idea wasn’t overly science-y.
But hormones did come up. On the Today show, one of the hosts mentioned — perhaps having seen the TED talk — that power poses can raise your testosterone levels. That was the takeaway, after all, wasn’t it? Cuddy replied quickly: “There’s some evidence that it does, there’s some evidence that it doesn’t.” On Morning Joe, she offered a more upbeat take: “One thing that we found is that when you adopt a powerful pose just for a couple of minutes, in some cases, it leads to an increase in testosterone and a decrease in cortisol.”
They had indeed found that. But, as Cuddy surely knew, there were strong reasons to suspect they had been wrong.
After the book tour was over, one of Cuddy’s co-authors, who had been silent on the topic of power poses for years, unexpectedly weighed in. Dana Carney posted a 1,000-word statement on her website saying, in unambiguous language, that she no longer believed in power poses. (She declined to be interviewed for this article.) She tore into her own methodology, calling the sample size “tiny” and noting that the effects are “small and barely there in some cases.” She would know: It was Carney and Yap, not Cuddy, who had carried out the data collection and analyzed the results. Carney also admitted that the self-reported feelings of power were p-hacked — that is, subjects were asked questions and then researchers chose only the answers that matched up best with their hypothesis.
What’s more, she wrote, the saliva samples used to test hormone levels were taken after subjects discovered whether they had won an extra $2 as part of the risk-taking portion of the study. Some research indicates that winning alone can boost testosterone. “Therefore,” Carney wrote, “this testosterone effect — if it is even to be believed — may merely be a winning effect, not an expansive posture effect.”
Carney’s refutation was picked up by New York magazine’s Science of Us blog. Cuddy responded with a longer statement, insisting, among other things, that the Ranehill paper was not really a failed replication. She argued that because Ranehill had also found that subjects who assumed power poses reported feeling more powerful afterward, the study was further confirmation. “The other outcomes (behavior, physiology, etc.) are secondary to the key effect,” Cuddy wrote.
The key effect? This was a shift. Again and again Cuddy had emphasized the data on hormones and behavior, not on self-reported feelings of power, which are more vulnerable to bias. And there was another reason to doubt that finding. In June, a paper published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science reported an attempt to replicate the self-reported-feelings portion of the power-poses study. The authors of the new paper found that “adopting a more expansive pose reduced feelings of power compared to adopting a more contractive pose.”
‘I simply encourage people to look at the entire evolving body of evidence’ on power poses, says Amy Cuddy.
Could they be right? Did power posing actually make people feel less powerful? Maybe. Though it might also be the case that power posing has no consistent effect on how people feel.
The first author of that paper, Katie Garrison, a graduate student in psychology at Texas A&M University, became interested in power poses after seeing Cuddy speak at a conference in 2014, a presentation that Garrison described as “really inspirational and cool.” She started doing power poses herself and, like Ranehill, was hoping to build on the study, not participate in its undoing. She has emerged from the experience decidedly more skeptical. “I don’t think I would encourage people before a test or an interview to stand up real tall and powerful,” she says.
In her response to Carney, Cuddy wrote that she was “concerned about the tenor” of the discussion regarding power poses and other disputed studies, worrying that such criticism could have a “chilling effect on science.” Cuddy’s not the only one. Some well-known psychologists, including Harvard’s Daniel Gilbert, have pushed back against the very idea of a replication crisis and criticized the critics for sniping at their colleagues rather than pursuing their own research.
Susan Fiske echoed this view in a draft of a column she wrote for the Association for Psychological Science’s magazine. In the column, which made its way online before it was officially published, Fiske, a professor of psychology at Princeton, referred to scientists who search for errors in published studies as “destructo-critics” engaged in “methodological terrorism.” She didn’t name names, but it wasn’t hard to guess whom she had in mind. She also didn’t mention Amy Cuddy, but Fiske had been Cuddy’s mentor at Princeton, and the two have co-written several papers. In an interview, Fiske says she prefers critiques that pass through peer review rather than the kind of banter taking place online. “You can say that a blog post can be responded to by the author, but it’s already been made public. If it turns out the criticism is wrong, there’s already been damage done to that person’s reputation,” she says. “I think it’s better if there’s an adult in the room.”
Fiske says she’s received emails from distraught researchers whose careers and sense of well-being have been harmed and from young researchers who fear that they, too, will fall victim to the “destructo-critics.” Some, she says, are leaving the field rather than face such hostility.
She also wonders whether the animus is motivated at all by sexism. Adam Galinsky, a professor of business at Columbia who has done research on power poses, also thinks that the vehemence might be related to gender. “The core of the criticism of that paper is valid,” Galinsky says, referring to Cuddy’s famous study. “The question is whether the intensity to tear it down would be as strong if it were from a man.”
The critics do tend to be male, and some high-profile targets of their criticism have been female, though there are exceptions on both sides. Perhaps the most viciously mocked psychology study in recent years was Daryl Bem’s 2011 paper, which purported to prove that subjects could “feel the future.”
Uri Simonsohn responded to Fiske’s criticism on his blog, Data Colada. Simonsohn, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who was once referred to as a “data vigilante” by The Atlantic, wrote a paper in 2011 explaining how research approaches in psychology frequently lead to false positives. He is looked to now as either a reformer or a troublemaker, depending mostly on whether you think replication is a real crisis.
Simonsohn acknowledges that there are times when he’s acted like, to use his word, a jerk, and he regrets it. On his blog he recently published suggestions for how to behave if you believe you’ve discovered problems in a study. They include “Don’t label, describe” and “Don’t speculate about motives.” He says, “It is almost impossible to challenge a scientist’s results without it getting personal, but I think we’re getting better and better at minimizing that.”
At the same time, he argues, criticism comes with the territory, and just because something isn’t nice doesn’t mean it’s not true. “Science is a public job,” he says. “What you say can and will be used against you in the public court of opinion. If that means science is not for you, that’s not ruining people. It’s getting rid of people who are not up to the job.”
Gelman’s rat analogy — the idea that psychology is infested with bogus papers — doesn’t paint a particularly flattering portrait of the field. But even he acknowledges that progress is being made, if more slowly than he and others would like. Several psychologists interviewed for this article said they didn’t think the power-pose study would be published today. Even though 2010 isn’t so far back, it’s now talked about like a bygone era. Galinsky admits that, say, a decade ago, he was eager to write papers that got noticed by the public. Now he’s more interested in keeping his head down. “I think people are more reluctant to rush out and offer their findings to the media,” he says.
That lines up with Joseph Cesario’s interpretation. Cesario, an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University, is co-editor of the journal Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology, which requires researchers to have their hypotheses and methods peer-reviewed before they begin their experiments. If you’ve said what you expect to find and promise to report your findings no matter what, then the garden of forking paths is not a temptation. The journal plans to publish an issue devoted to power-pose-related replications in the spring. “If you really want to know about some topic, it takes years to scratch the surface,” Cesario says. “If there’s a cautionary tale, that should be part of it — to be a little more modest.”
As for power poses, one recent headline declared the concept dead. That’s not exactly true. The book is still available, and Cuddy continues to give presentations around the country on “Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges.”
Via email, Cuddy held firm to what she’s said in her public statements. “Hormones are not the primary emphasis in any of my work — my book, my research, or my teaching,” she wrote. “I simply encourage people to look at the entire evolving body of evidence, across disciplines when trying to sort out how these complex relationships among posture and movement, social stimuli, nervous system responses, hormones, and so on, are or are not related.”
She also praised a recent decision by TED to add a science curator to its staff: “This is a great move toward increasing the public’s science literacy, which is so important in an era of rapid-fire clickbait headlines and articles.”
After being contacted by The Chronicle Review about the controversy, officials at TED added the following parenthetical to the video’s description (wording that a spokeswoman said was crafted with Cuddy’s input): “Some of the findings presented in this talk have been referenced in an ongoing debate among social scientists about robustness and reproducibility.” TED also included a link to Cuddy’s defense of the study.
An acknowledgment, if not quite a correction.
Even so, power posing gains enthusiastic new adherents every day. Scroll through the thousands of online comments and you might wonder whether all the criticism is misplaced. Some people do find it inspiring. Besides, we’re not talking about a cure for cancer here. Why does it matter if people stand like Wonder Woman in front of the mirror for two minutes each morning? Really, what’s the harm?
Simonsohn, the data vigilante, has an answer. “The main reason to be worried about power posing is not power posing — that’s trivial entertainment,” he says. “But it would be great if it didn’t come at the expense of the science brand.”
Tom Bartlett is a senior writer at The Chronicle.