Does power pose have an impact on our body and self-perception ?
In this article I want to provide an overview of the best arguments in favor and against power posing, so that you can make your own mind on the topic.
What is Power Posing ?
Amy Cuddy, psychology researcher, gained an immense fame thanks to her ted talk “Your body language may shape who you are” (over 59 million views to this day, translated into 52 languages). In her speech, she presents groundbreaking evidence of the link between posture, self-confidence and performance.
She argues that our perception of others — how strong, competent, or trustworthy they seem— is influenced by their body language and non-verbal behaviour influence. The perception of an individual’s intelligence can impact an election’s outcomes, our chances of getting hired. Key moments in our lives could be determined by seemingly inconsequential things such as our posture or physical appearance.
She also claims that changing posture is a signal used to demonstrate power. To make her point she uses evidence from other animal’s body language : peacocks expand their tail during the seduction parade, cats walk sideways and bristle their fur to appear larger when they engage in a confrontation with another cat.
Our position in a group hierarchy can also influence what happens in our body. The dominant individual’s body chemistry can be described by the formula :
Alpha male = high testosterone + low cortisol
This holds for primates, humans and other animal species. To keep things simple, cortisol is a hormone related to stress, while testosterone is associated with power and assertiveness. An individual gaining (losing) power in the group will see its testosterone level increase (drop) and its cortisol level move in the opposite direction.
This led Amy Cuddy to wonder : If power influences our body, can we fake it until we make it ? Can we reverse causality and voluntarily use power posing to increase our self-confidence ?
To find out, she asked participants to hold a power pose (open, expansive and powerful posture) or powerless poses (contracted posture).
She found that holding 2 power poses for 1 minute increases our level of testosterone and reduces cortisol. Subjects were also more likely to gamble and were perceived as more convincing when defending their application for a job. The individuals holding powerless poses had opposite results — testosterone drop, cortisol spike, less likely to gamble.
Many academics have since tried to replicate her study to see if they obtained the same results, with varying degrees of success. Amy has been very strongly criticized for it, and became an infamous example of replication failure.
Let’s review the strongest arguments made in favour and against her study, in order to weigh the relative merit of each side.
Evidence in favor of power posing
In the original study (Carney, Cuddy, and Yap, 2010) 42 individuals were asked to hold two high or low power poses for 1 minute each. Saliva samples were taken before and after the test to measure their level of cortisol and testosterone. To assess gambling tendency, subjects were offered the choice between taking 2$ now (safe option) or a 50/50 chance to win 4$ or nothing (fair but risky bet). To measure self-perception, participants rated how confident and powerful they felt after the poses-holding.
Results : 86% of the high-power pose took the bet, vs 60% of the low-power pose. The first group felt more powerful than the latter (mean of 2.57 vs 1.83, std = 0.81).
Over 30 studies have provided additional evidence supporting power-posing (Carney et al., 2015).
Amy Cuddy performed a p-curve analysis of 55 related studies (Cuddy et al., 2017). A p-curve is a technique that aims to determine if an ensemble of findings are biased (data mining), or if they provide conclusive and reliable evidence. We typically look at the slope of the p-curve : a flat line indicates that : a) the average effect size is 0 and b) the effect published are due to selective reporting (reporting only the positive results) :
She found significant results regarding the impact of posture on emotion and self-reported feelings of power. However, the link between hormonal change (testosterone and cortisol) and power posing was less conclusive.
Evidence against power posing
Other studies failed to replicate Amy’s original findings (Ranehill et al., 2015), even when using a larger sample (200 participants), and asking them to hold 2 poses for 3 minutes each (instead of 1). They did not find any change in risk-taking behavior (both choose to gamble about 45% of the time) or hormone level.
Amy Cuddy responded that a total posing time of 6 minutes vs 2 in her study, might have caused the difference in results. She argues holding a pose for 3 minutes is too long and uncomfortable, affecting the subject’s self-perception of power and confidence.
Simmons and Simonsohn (2017) computed a p-curve analysis of 33 replication studies and found that it was flat, suggesting that literature did not count as strong evidence.
They conclude that the findings on hormones and risk-taking were probably a result of chance, but the power posing on “self-reported power” is significant. However, a demand-bias could explain the self-reporting results (subject answering what they think the study tries to demonstrate).
Dana Carney (co-author of the original study) wrote : “I do not believe that power pose effects are real, I discourage others from studying power poses”. She advances that the original study contained many flaws, including : flimsy data, tiny sample, small effects size.
In particular, she explained that during the research :
- too many of the people involved were aware of the hypothesis being tested
- when participants won in the gambling task, they were directly informed that they had won, thus testosterone increase could be due to a winning effect, not power pose
Amy Cuddy (the ted talk speaker) later commented on another study which tried to replicate her findings : “They found no hormonal effects. That study is done very well, and I trust those results. I am confident about the power posing effect on feelings of power, I am agnostic about its effects on hormones.”
This issue isn’t specific to psychology. Social sciences at large are going through a replication crisis.
Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn (2011) found that there is a high risk of false-positive reporting when studies combine several flaws such as flexible data collection (letting the scientist free of continuing or stopping the data collection without predefined criteria, e.g. reaching 100 participants), outliers dropping (deleting observations that significantly differ from the sample, to reduce the noise and keep the signal in the data), using too many variables (overfitting the data).
They showed there is up to 60% chance that academic findings are false-positive (observing an effect in the sample data when there is none in the actual population), if they combine several of those flaws.
Thanks for reading, I hope this will help you to to make you own mind about whether power posing has an effect on our body and self-perception. I don’t claim to be an expert on the topic, so if I made any mistake please let me know and if I forgot other key points, don’t hesitate to share it !
Sources
- Research papers
Carney, Cuddy, and Yap (2010), Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance, Psychological Science, Vol. 21, 1363–1368
Cuddy, Schultz, and Fosse (2017), P-curving A More Comprehensive Body of Research on Postural Feedback Reveals Clear Evidential Value For ‘Power Posing’ Effects: Reply to Simmons and Simonsohn, Psychological Science, Vol. 29
Ranehill, Dreber, Johannesson, Leiberg, Sul and Weber (2015), Assessing the Robustness of Power Posing: No Effect on Hormones and Risk Tolerance in a Large Sample of Men and Women, Psychological Science, Vol.26, 653–656
Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn (2011), False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant, Psychological Science, Vol.22, 1359–1366
Simmons and Simonsohn (2017), Power Posing: P-Curving the Evidence, Psychological Science, Vol.28
- Articles
Dana Carney (2017), My position on “Power Poses”
David Biello (2017), Inside the debate about power posing: a Q & A with Amy Cuddy, ideas.ted.com
Jesse Singal (2016),Power Posing’ Co-author: ‘I Do Not Believe That ‘Power Pose’ Effects Are Real, The CUT
Jesse Singal and Melissa Dahl (2016), Here Is Amy Cuddy’s Response to Critiques of Her Power-Posing Research, The CUT
Meghan Bartels (2017), Power Poses’ Don’t Really Make You More Powerful, Nine More Studies Confirm, Newsweek
Susan Dominus (2017), When the Revolution came for Amy Cuddy, The New York Times
Uri Simonsohn and Joe Simmons (2015), Power Posing: Reassessing The Evidence Behind The Most Popular TED Talk, Data Colada
- Videos of Amy Cuddy’s presentation of her findings
Your body language may shape who you are, TED, 10/01/2012
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks-_Mh1QhMc
Amy Cuddy: Power Poses, poptech, 11/02/2011
