Power Posing Revisited

What survived the replication crisis, what did not, and what is actually useful

Does power posing actually work — and what does the replication debate mean for you?

Amy Cuddy’s original 2010 claim — that two minutes of expansive posture changes hormone levels and risk-taking — failed to replicate reliably, and even one of the original co-authors distanced herself from the hormonal mechanism. The more modest finding — that posture affects subjective confidence and behavior — has held up better, though the effect sizes are small. The honest take: posture matters, the original claims were overreached, and the useful practices are simpler and more defensible than the original study suggested.

Few studies in social psychology have had a bigger public moment and a sharper scientific comedown than the 2010 power posing paper. The TED talk has 60 million views; the replication attempts have been far less flattering. But the story is not as simple as "it was all fake." Some effects held up. Some mechanisms are plausible. And the underlying intuition — that how you carry your body affects how you feel and behave — has real support, even if the original hormone story did not. These practices are what remains after honest scrutiny.