Does Power Posing Actually Work?

In 2010, three psychologists asked forty-two people to hold a pose for one minute. Half were told to sit or stand in "expansive" positions - feet on the desk, arms spread wide, the sort of stance a superhero takes before saving the day. The other half held "contractive" positions - arms crossed, shoulders hunched, legs together. Before and after, the researchers took saliva samples and measured two hormones, testosterone and cortisol, and gave everyone a small gambling task to see who was willing to take a risk.

The result, published by Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy and Andy Yap, was striking. People who had held the expansive poses showed a rise in testosterone and a drop in cortisol, on average, compared with those who had held the contractive ones. They also took more risks in the gambling task and reported feeling more "in charge" and "in control". The idea was simple and appealing: two minutes of standing differently could shift your biology and your behaviour.

The finding travelled far beyond academic journals. A talk built around it became one of the most watched of its kind online, translated into dozens of languages, and the phrase "power posing" entered ordinary conversation - something to do backstage before a job interview, in a locker room before a match, or alone in a bathroom stall before a difficult meeting. "Fake it until you become it" was the memorable line, and it is the kind of claim that is easy to love: cheap, quick, and about your own body rather than anything harder to change.

A bigger, stricter test

Five years later, a team led by Eva Ranehill ran a much larger and more carefully designed version of the same experiment. Where the original study had forty-two participants, this one had more than two hundred. The protocol was registered in advance, meaning the researchers stated exactly what they would measure and how before collecting a single data point - a safeguard against quietly changing the analysis after seeing the results.

The larger study found no effect on testosterone. No effect on cortisol. No effect on risk-taking in the gambling task. One thing did survive: people who held the expansive poses still rated themselves as feeling more powerful than those who held the contractive ones. The hormones and the real-world risk behaviour did not follow.

The original author changes her mind

In 2016, Dana Carney - one of the three original authors - published a statement saying she no longer believed the hormonal effect was real. She pointed to the small original sample, to standard research practices of that era that we now know invite trouble - measuring several outcomes and reporting the ones that reached significance, deciding when to stop collecting data based on how the results were looking - and to the fact that later, better-powered studies had not found what the first one did. It was an unusually direct retraction of belief in one's own widely cited work, and it mattered: it is far easier to publish a surprising finding than to make it go away once it has become famous.

What the statistics experts disagreed about

Two more groups of researchers then applied a technique called p-curve analysis to sets of power-posing studies. The method looks at the distribution of p-values across many significant results to judge whether they look like real effects or like the product of selective reporting. Joseph Simmons and Uri Simonsohn ran this analysis in 2017 on the published power-posing literature and concluded that the pattern of results was indistinguishable from what you would expect if the true effect were zero and only the studies that happened to reach significance got published - a verdict that, in their reading, covered claims about feelings and behaviour as well as the hormonal ones. Cuddy, together with Schultz and Fosse, published a reply the following year using a broader set of studies on posture and body feedback in general, not only the power-posing experiments, and argued that this larger picture showed clearer evidence for an effect on feelings and behaviour, even though the hormonal claims were by then largely abandoned. The two sides have not settled the dispute, and that disagreement is itself informative: even statisticians looking at related bodies of literature can reach different conclusions depending on which studies they include.

Where the evidence lands today

Strip away the biology and the behavioural claims, which mostly did not survive a decade of scrutiny, and what is left is smaller and less exciting: adopting a more open, upright posture can change how you feel about yourself in that moment, at least a little. That is not nothing - mood and posture are linked in plenty of well-studied ways that have nothing to do with testosterone - but it is a long way from "changes your biology" and further still from "performs better in an interview".

What this means for you

If standing tall before a difficult conversation makes you feel steadier, there is no real cost to doing it, and modest evidence that it can shift how confident you feel in the moment. Just do not mistake the feeling of confidence for a guarantee of doing well, and do not let two minutes of posing replace actual preparation. If you are curious about the more durable side of this question - how self-efficacy or a sense of personal charisma actually shows up in the moments that matter, like a first impression or a difficult negotiation - that is exactly what our self-efficacy, charisma and first impressions tests are built to explore, and unlike the pose itself, those questions have a much steadier body of research behind them.