Power posing

type: effect · origin: study · evidence: failed to replicate · themes: habits and self-control

Claim assessed: A few minutes in a power pose change your hormones and make you more willing to take risks.

Published 6 October 2026, updated 7 October 2026 · how we work

In short

Power posing is the idea that if you hold a wide, open position for a few minutes, for example with hands on hips and feet apart, your body changes your inner state: testosterone goes up, the stress hormone goes down, you become more willing to take risks and you feel more powerful. The idea became very popular through a TED talk and a bestselling book. Replications didn’t find the effects on hormones and behaviour, though, and the effect on feeling powerful is small and disputed.

What it says

The original study. Carney, Cuddy and Yap (2010) reported that participants who held a power pose had more testosterone, less cortisol, felt more powerful and more often accepted a risky bet than those who held a contractive, hunched posture. We haven’t read the study; we describe it from Carney (2016) and Credé (2019).

The replications. Ranehill et al. (2015) repeated the study with a much larger sample of men and women and found no effect on hormones or on risk, only on feeling powerful. Simmons and Simonsohn (2017) statistically analysed the published studies on posture effects, setting aside feelings of power, and found no evidence of an effect. We describe them from Credé and Carney; we haven’t read them. Barel et al. (2024), with 92 young adults, replicated neither the effect on testosterone nor those on feeling powerful or on risk. They found only a partial link between a drop in cortisol and risk-taking.

What the author herself says. Dana Carney, the original study’s lead author, published a statement on her Berkeley page: she doesn’t believe power pose effects are real and discourages others from studying them. She lists the study’s problems: a small sample of 42 participants, “flimsy” data, participants added in batches, with the result checked after each one, choosing the statistical test that gave the desired result, and choosing, among several questions about power, the ones that “worked”. She also notes that the experimenters knew the hypothesis and that the testosterone effect may have come from risk-takers being able to win money.

The contractive pose, not the power pose. Cuddy, Schultz and Fosse (2018) argued that the literature still shows an effect on feeling powerful and on emotional state. Credé (2019) noted that almost all these studies compared the power pose with a contractive pose, with no group sitting normally. In the few studies that also had a neutral group, the power pose was no better than the ordinary one; the difference came from the contractive pose making people feel worse. In one of them, those in the power pose even felt the least dominant.

Example

Before an interview, someone stands in the bathroom for two minutes with hands on hips, as they saw in a video. They may feel a bit more confident, but they have no reason to believe their hormones or chances have changed. The example is an illustration, not a study cited here.

How to apply it

The steps below are a practical way to apply it that we propose, based on the studies cited.

1. Don’t rely on a posture to change your hormones or your courage. Large replications didn’t find these effects.
2. Still avoid sitting hunched before an important moment. The evidence suggests that a contractive posture may make you feel worse, not that a wide one makes you feel better.
3. Invest in preparation, not rituals. Practising your interview answers has a clear link to the outcome; posture doesn’t.
4. Take the case seriously as a lesson in method. Small samples, analyses chosen after seeing the result and experimenters who know the hypothesis can produce spectacular effects that don’t replicate.

Limits and nuances

• The effect on feeling powerful is disputed, not necessarily zero. Ranehill et al. found it, Barel et al. didn’t. Credé shows it seems to come mostly from the contractive comparison pose.
• Participants’ expectations may matter. Credé notes, as do Simmons and Simonsohn, that part of the reported effects may come from participants guessing what is expected of them.
• Not all authors have given up. Amy Cuddy, a co-author of the original study, argued in 2018 that the literature still shows effects on emotional state. We haven’t read her analysis; we describe it from Credé.
• What we read. Carney’s statement (2016), from her page at the University of California, Berkeley, Credé (2019), from Meta-Psychology, and Barel et al. (2024), from PubMed Central, we read in full. We haven’t read Carney et al. (2010), Ranehill et al. (2015), Simmons and Simonsohn (2017) or Cuddy et al. (2018); we describe them from Carney and Credé. We know the two studies in the diagram only from Credé.

Sources

• Dana R. Carney, Amy J. C. Cuddy, Andy J. Yap (2010). Power posing: Brief nonverbal displays affect neuroendocrine levels and risk tolerance
• Eva Ranehill, Anna Dreber, Magnus Johannesson, Susanne Leiberg, Sunhae Sul, Roberto A. Weber (2015). Assessing the robustness of power posing: No effect on hormones and risk tolerance in a large sample of men and women
• Dana R. Carney (2016). My position on "power poses"
• Joseph P. Simmons, Uri Simonsohn (2017). Power posing: P-curving the evidence
• Marcus Credé (2019). A negative effect of a contractive pose is not evidence for the positive effect of an expansive pose: Comment on Cuddy, Schultz, and Fosse (2018)
• Efrat Barel, Shosh Shahrabani, Lila Mahagna (2024). The effects of power posing on neuroendocrine levels and risk-taking

See also: Ego depletion, Facial feedback, Moral licensing, Priming