Power poses come under fire
RESEARCHER ARGUES EFFECTS AREN’T REAL
Until recently, the power pose had all the makings of viral self-help success: a catchy name, the second most-popular TED Talk of all time, and, best of all, the science to back it up. All you had to do was stand like a powerful person for a few minutes, and you would become a powerful person. But can a simple idea, once absorbed into the maw of the workplace-advice industry, survive even when the science doesn’t hold up?
“I use them still,” said Carla Sorey-Reed, an executive coach and the founder and chief executive of Women Uninterrupted. Her trust in the power pose remained undimmed four weeks after the psychological research underpinning the idea had started to crumble in public. “I do it! When I’m meeting a new client,” SoreyReed said, “I will go into the ladies room, close the door, and do a power pose.”
Back in 2010, a group of researchers demonstrated that standing, just for two minutes, in various dominant positions — like Wonder Woman — increased testosterone and lowered cortisol levels. The power pose, therefore, had both psychological and physiological benefits. Two years later, Amy Cuddy, one of the study’s authors, packaged that enticing idea into an extraordinarily popular TED Talk.
From there, the power pose took off. Cuddy, a researcher at Harvard University, went on to write the New York Times bestseller Presence, a book about how body language can change the way we think. The business self-help media ate it up, running stories with headlines like “This Simple ‘Power Pose’ Can Change Your Life And Career” and “The ‘Power Poses’ That Will Instantly Boost Your Confidence Levels.”
Top executives and office workers, helped by consultants and coaches, actually started doing it. Sheryl Sandberg called herself a “huge fan” and invited Cuddy to develop a program for her Lean In organization. The power pose was particularly appealing to women, who are used to being told that they perform wrong at work. It was yet another “body language hack” that a qualified, underpromoted woman could use to beat workplace sexism.
A funny thing happened on the way to making the power pose a modern part of conventional wisdom about how to succeed at work. The research came under attack by one of the study’s own researchers.
Dana Carney, an associate professor and Berkeley’s Haas School of Management, wrote an indictment last month of her own work. “I do not believe that ‘power pose’ effects are real,” she said in a statement posted to her website. She no longer studies power poses, discourages others from doing so, and says she no longer teaches the subject in her classes. Her renunciation of the power pose comes after criticism from other researchers and multiple replication failures of the original research. The bulk of the criticism focuses on the researchers use of “p-hacking,” a way of manipulating data to get the desired statistical outcome.
Cuddy, who has built a career and her celebrity on the sturdy back of power poses, still stands — firmly, two feet planted in the ground, and arms raised — behind her research. “I have confidence in the effects of expansive postures on people’s feelings of power — and that feeling powerful is a critical psychological variable,” she wrote in a lengthy response to Carney. That’s the line that power pose devotees are holding.
“I’m not a scientist,” said Matt Kohut, a partner at KNP Communications, an executive coaching firm. (Kohut has written articles with Cuddy, and she blurbed his book.) “But I know that if something makes you feel confident, regardless if you can show it in a test, it might be a helpful thing.”
Interviews with career coaches in the four weeks since Carney came out against the power pose research turned up nobody who had turned their back on the posture. Most either hadn’t heard about the scandal or didn’t think the research would change their teachings.
Cuddy first got the idea of power posing from a former FBI agent, Joe Navarro, who said police investigators would sometimes use bigger chairs during interrogations to make themselves feel imposing. Several power pose practitioners trace the concept’s origins to method acting, citing Lee Strasberg and Michael Chekhov. When actors have to perform a vulnerable scene, they might rock back and forth in the fetal position beforehand. Power posing is a version of that.
Having some science (and a TED Talk with more than 37 million views) behind it, however, helped coaches get business executives and technical engineers to buy in. Acting is just acting. The power pose, because of Cuddy’s research, promised to change a person.
“I always say, what do you have to lose,” said SoreyRead, “I mean, really — two minutes?”
IF SOMETHING MAKES YOU FEEL CONFIDENT, REGARDLESS IF YOU CAN SHOW IT IN A TEST, IT MIGHT BE A HELPFUL THING. — MATT KOHUT, COACHING PROFESSIONAL