The Perils of Power Posing Research

Introduction

Psychology is full of fascinating stories, but few are more exciting than the history of “power posing” research. It all started in 2010, when a study by Carney, Cuddy, and Yap showed us that it was possible to make yourself feel powerful, become more of a risk taker, and make yourself less stressed simply by standing in a power pose for one minute.

At the time, this research was revolutionary. It sparked a TED talk from one of the co-authors, Amy Cuddy, which quickly became the most popular TED talk of all time. (Now, it sits in 3rd place with over 75 million views). People were told that they could feel more powerful simply by acting more powerful. Some put this into practice; getting into a power pose just before a job interview or a date so they felt more powerful and confident for it. Things were looking great for power posing research. However, that was all about to change.

Replication studies arrive

In 2015, Eva Ranehill and her colleagues from the University of Zurich ran a replication of the original study. However, instead of replicating the original findings, they found that power posing had no effect on people’s behaviour or their hormonal levels. Following this, Garrison et al (2016) also failed to replicate the original findings. No behavioural or hormonal effects either. Not only this, they found that people in power poses actually felt less powerful!

It got worse. A series of other failed replications followed, and the future of power posing was now looking pretty grim. All this forced Dana Carney, the lead author of the original study, to release a statement saying plainly: “I do not believe that ‘power pose’ effects are real”. She also cited some problems with the methods used in the original study and even made claims of p-hacking. That wasn’t good.

Just in case that wasn’t enough drama for you, there was another twist: You see, while all this research was going on, lots of researchers were finding support for power posing. Not only did these studies find that people felt more powerful in power poses, they could actually make people more tolerant to pain (Bohns & Withermuth, 2012) and guess heavy boxes to be lighter than they were (Lee & Schnall, 2014). What on earth was going on?

Finally, in 2017, a meta-analysis was conducted to settle this once and for all. Six labs across the world ran replications of the original study following the approval and guidance of Dana Carney. The results of this study revealed that power posing can indeed make people feel more powerful, but that it rarely leads to any meaningful behaviour change. Today, this is the stance most people take.

Our research at UH

So, where do we go from here? Well, now we have a much clearer picture of what power posing can do for individuals, we should now focus on what impact they have on other people. How do we react when we see someone power posing? Do we think they look more confident, or – to be honest – a bit silly?

In my first blog post, I explained how we contributed to this research here at Hertfordshire. In a study we published in 2016, we found that people in high power poses do look more confident than those in low power poses, but – here’s the twist – people almost always look more confident when they’re not trying to pose in any way at all and are just sitting or standing naturally.

Since then, we’ve taken this a bit further. We wanted to ask why do people think this? Can we spot when someone is posing naturally or when they’re trying to “fake it ‘til they make it”? To test this, we again showed people photos of people in high-power, low-power, or neutral poses, but this time asked how authentic the person looked. We found what we suspected; that people generally look more confident and authentic in regular, neutral poses.

Summary

There are a couple of lessons to learn from this. First, Psychology research can be very complicated, and we should pause before applying the results of one experiment to our everyday lives. Second, as I said in my first blog post, while power posing may make you feel more powerful, it doesn’t always make you look more powerful. So, feel free to power pose if it makes you feel better but, when you’re around others, your best pose is your natural pose!

Author

Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Dr Daniel Gurney