NEW YORK: 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,” Sorey-Reed 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 the 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.
She tells a teary eyed story about overcoming her own impostor syndrome, and then offers up the perfect catchphrase. “Don’t fake it until you make it, fake it until you become it,” she says at the climax of the 12 minute presentation.
From there, the power pose took off. Cuddy, a researcher at Harvard University, went on to write the New York Times best seller 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 organisation. 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. Standing in a bathroom stall for two minutes is a lot easier than addressing systemic problems”-and also there’s science!
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.
“This is a bomb going off in the centre of the thought leadership-industrial complex,” wrote Drake Baer at New York magazine’s Science of Us blog. But, strangely, there haven’t been many explosions or much fallout.
For one, 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 blubbed 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.”
Kohut’s firm still coaches power posing as a technique to get in the right frame of mind before going on stage or into a big presentation. Power posing most often happens behind the scenes and not in front of big groups. Just think of how ridiculous it would look to stand with arms raised in front of a conference room full of people.
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. “We debate it more internally than anything else,” said Kelly Decker, president of Decker Communications, a business coaching firm. Her group teaches the “forward lean,” its twist on the power pose that’s more appropriate for group settings. “For us it’s about the practice of it, how people are coming across. I can’t speak to the research aspect of it.” The cost of these services widely depending on a client’s needs, according to these coaches, but it can run anywhere from a few hundred dollars an hour to a four-figure day rate or $10,000 for a six-month course.
The power pose took its own advice. By faking legitimacy until it became doctrine, there’s now no turning back.
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. And, in fact, Allison Williams used “reverse power posing” when playing Marnie on Girls to signal her insecurities. “Marnie generally has her shoulders forward, inched slightly up, and her arms folded as a line of defence,” she told the New York Times.
Having some science (and a TED Talk with over 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. “After Amy popularised this stuff it was a lot easier to get people to try it,” said Kohut. It gave coaches legitimacy.
“It was very accessible,” said Sorey-Reed. “It was simple in concept and powerful in implementation.”
When teaching the power pose today, some practitioners will mention the disagreements between researchers even while pushing it as a useful tool. “People are still open to it,” said Kohut. “And I do give them the Chekhov story and try to convince them.”
The coaching-industrial complex doesn’t rely on science for most of its suggestions anyway. Many of the coaching firms insisted that they encouraged practices similar to power poses long before Cuddy’s TED Talk, even if they didn’t have a name for it. As long as the techniques make people feel better, that might be all that matters.
“I always say what do you have to lose,” said Sorey-Read, “I mean, really — two minutes?”
