Power posing: the author who stopped believing her own study

Power posing, and the author who stopped believing it. · published 8 September 2026

The most watched psychology talk in the world rests on a paper whose first author has since written, in public, that she does not believe the result — while the milder version of the claim, that it changes how you feel, is still standing.

The angle

The 2010 power-posing study (42 participants) reported hormonal and risk-taking effects; a ~200-person replication in 2015 found the feeling of power held but the hormones and risk-taking did not, a 2017 p-curve analysis found no evidential value for those effects, and in 2016 the paper’s own first author, Dana Carney, publicly wrote that she no longer believes them — while the milder claim, that posture changes how you feel, is still standing.

The notes this episode was written from

These are the working notes, unedited. Everything the video states as fact comes from here, and nothing else may be stated as fact. The sections on limits and on what the finding does not show are part of the brief, not an afterthought — see the method.

The original: Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy and Andy Yap, “Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance” (Psychological Science, 2010). Forty-two participants held either expansive “high-power” postures or contracted “low-power” ones for two minutes. The paper reported that the high-power group showed raised testosterone, lowered cortisol, more risk-taking, and reported feeling more powerful.

Amy Cuddy’s 2012 TED talk about it became one of the most watched ever, tens of millions of views, and the advice — stand like this before an interview — spread everywhere.

What happened next

Ranehill and colleagues (Psychological Science, 2015) ran a much larger replication, around two hundred participants against the original forty-two. The feeling of power replicated. The hormonal changes and the risk-taking did not.

Simmons and Simonsohn (2017) applied a p-curve analysis across the published power-posing literature and concluded it contained no evidential value for the behavioural and physiological effects.

The unusual part

In 2016 Dana Carney, the paper’s first author, published a statement on her own university web page saying plainly that she does not believe the effects are real. She listed the methodological problems as she now saw them, said she no longer studies the topic, and discouraged others from building on it. Authors rarely do this in public, and almost never about their own most cited work.

The dispute that remains. Amy Cuddy has not accepted that the whole thing falls. Later work with Cuddy as an author (2018) argued that the self-reported feeling of power does hold up across many studies, which the 2015 replication also found. So “you feel more confident” is on far better footing than “your testosterone rises.”

What this does not show

That posture does nothing, or that Cuddy acted in bad faith. The felt effect survives; the hormonal mechanism is what collapsed. The episode became unusually personal and public, and describing it as one researcher being proved a fraud would be both wrong and unfair.