Does power posing work before a presentation?
The original study did not replicate. One of its own authors no longer believes it. What survives is smaller than the talk suggests — and more useful.
Partly, and far less than you were told. The 2010 study that made power posing famous reported three things: people felt more powerful, their hormones shifted, and they took more risks. A larger, preregistered replication in 2015 found the first and neither of the other two.
One of the original authors has since stated in public that she does not believe the effect is real. Two minutes in a cubicle will not change your testosterone. It may make you feel briefly better, which is not nothing — and is also not preparation.
If you have ever been told to stand like Wonder Woman in a toilet cubicle before a pitch, you have met the most successful piece of presentation advice of the last fifteen years. It came from a 2010 paper and a 2012 talk that has been watched tens of millions of times. It is still repeated in corporate training rooms every week.
It is also, in the form most people repeat it, wrong. The interesting part is not that it fell apart — plenty of psychology did. The interesting part is which piece survived, because that piece tells you something worth knowing about the ten minutes before you walk in.
What the original study claimed
Carney, Cuddy and Yap put 42 people into either expansive postures — feet on the desk, hands behind the head — or contracted ones, for two minutes. Then they measured three things.
- Felt power. Participants rated how powerful and in charge they felt.
- Hormones. Saliva samples before and after, for testosterone and cortisol.
- Behaviour. A gambling task. 86% of the expansive group took the bet, against 60% of the contracted group.
All three moved in the predicted direction, and that combination is what made the finding so persuasive. It was not merely that people said they felt different — their body chemistry and their choices appeared to follow. A two-minute intervention with a hormonal mechanism behind it is an extraordinarily attractive result.
What happened when someone ran it again
In 2015 Ranehill and colleagues repeated the experiment with 200 participants, nearly five times the original sample. They also registered their analysis plan before collecting data, so the results could not be shaped afterwards by whichever comparisons happened to look good.
The feeling replicated. People who had stood expansively did report feeling more powerful. Everything underneath it did not: no hormonal change, no change in risk behaviour. Seven further preregistered replications published in 2017 found the same pattern — the subjective effect, and nothing measurable below it.
The part that almost never gets mentioned
In 2016 Dana Carney, the first author of the original paper, posted a statement on her university page saying she no longer believed the effect was real, that she does not teach it, and that she discourages others from studying it. She also listed, in detail, the decisions in her own study that she had come to see as problems.
Amy Cuddy, the second author, has continued to defend a narrower claim: that an expansive posture reliably makes people feel more powerful, and that the feeling has value. On the evidence, she is right about that part. The 2018 analysis she co-authored makes a reasonable case for the felt-power effect specifically.
To be fair to the science: "did not replicate" is not "fraudulent". It means a small first study found something a larger, stricter study could not confirm. That is the process working as intended. The failure is not really the researchers' — it is the fifteen-year gap between the correction and the advice still being handed out in training rooms.
So does it do anything?
It makes you feel slightly better for a short while. That is real, and it is not worthless. But notice what it is: a mood change, of the same family as a walk round the block or a strong coffee. It does not alter what you are about to say, and it does not touch the mechanism by which presentations actually go wrong.
Which is worth naming, because it explains why the advice sold so well. Power posing offered something almost nothing else in this field does — a fix that takes two minutes, requires no thinking, and can be done after you have run out of time to prepare. That is exactly the appeal, and exactly the problem.
What I would do with those two minutes instead
Nerves before a presentation are usually not about posture. They are about uncertainty: you do not yet know, in a form you could say out loud, what you want this room to do. The body is responding sensibly to an unresolved problem.
So spend the two minutes on the problem. Finish this sentence, aloud, in one breath:
If it comes out cleanly, you are better prepared than any posture would have made you, and the nerves tend to drop on their own — the thing they were pointing at has been answered. If it does not come out cleanly, you have just found the real problem with two minutes to go. Unpleasant, and still a great deal better than finding it in front of the room.
That is not a trick, and done properly it takes considerably longer than two minutes. Which is the honest reason this advice never spread the way power posing did.
Sources
- Carney, D. R., Cuddy, A. J. C., & Yap, A. J. (2010). Power posing: brief nonverbal displays affect neuroendocrine levels and risk tolerance. Psychological Science, 21(10), 1363–1368.
- Ranehill, E., Dreber, A., Johannesson, M., Leiberg, S., Sul, S., & Weber, R. A. (2015). Assessing the robustness of power posing. Psychological Science, 26(5), 653–656.
- Carney, D. R. (2016). My position on "power poses". Public statement, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley.
- Jonas, K. J., et al. (2017). Power poses — where do we stand? Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology, 2(1). Seven preregistered replications.
- Cuddy, A. J. C., Schultz, S. J., & Fosse, N. E. (2018). P-curving a more comprehensive body of research on postural feedback. Psychological Science, 29(4), 656–666.