Who’s the Wonder Woman of presenting? Amy Cuddy. I’m bastardising her research a lot here, but the idea is that adopting certain “power poses” can greatly increase confidence and the most famous of these poses is the one typically adopted by the comic character Wonder Woman.
You know the one – legs shoulder width apart, chest up/out and her hand in fists resting on her hips…
The idea is that even just a couple of minutes spent in a power pose will give you the boost you need. Essentially Cuddy postulated that as we “stand small” when we’re anxious and “stand big” when we’re feeling confident, it might be the case that the positions themselves could be a cause of the feeling as well as (or even instead of) just being the result of the emotion. After a lot of experimentation she and her team concluded that this was the case.
It’s a technique that I’ve taught in the past as it was based on pretty thorough research – and it strikes a chord with the people I’ve shown it to. (Note, not everyone – no single technique can be expected to feel right for everyone.) Prof Cuddy does a better job explaining it in more detail if you want to get it from the horse’s mouth in an excellent TED talk.
So far, so good. But now it gets messy, because one of the collaborators with Amy Cuddy on her research has cast doubt on it (well, she thinks she’s sunk it, to be frank!) by observing that
- the results haven’t been replicated on bigger studies
- there was P-hacking in the original research.
Now I’m a research scientist so I know what P-hacking is and I can tell you it’s both pretty easy to do and pretty damn immoral if you do it on purpose. To cut a long story short, it’s a very credible-looking way to pick-and-chose what results you consider as part of your conclusions. If Dana Carney (the colleague in question) is right, there’s not much to the whole idea of Power Posing – so where does that leave us? Two things spring to mind…
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A Rebuttal of the rebuttal
Amy Cuddy isn’t taking this lying down and has come back fighting. In a reasonably strongly worded and assertive note (cited here) Cuddy says:
- this effect has been replicated in at least nine published studies and in at least four unpublished studies from nine different labs
- at least one of the occasions that have been reported as not substantiating her research actually did so, pretty clearly
- she and her lab have quite a lot more evidence that they’ve not published (academic papers have strict word limits so this isn’t surprising)
- she’s hired someone to check her work (there’s a small error which she accepts, but not one that changes the ‘storyline’ of the research)
All in all it’s a fairly strong, but politely worded version of “I’m right and you’re wrong, because…”. Assuming Cuddy’s not outright making things up about the other research groups’ replications of her work, I’m inclined to stand by her original ideas.
I’m not saying the technique works for everyone (some people find it too ‘silly’ for example) but for a lot of people it seems like a powerful tool.
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The placebo effect
Just because something isn’t real doesn’t mean it does work. Crazy, I know but that’s the guts of the Placebo Effect. Essentially the Placebo Effect suggests that if you believe something to be true it becomes true: a stereotypical example would be that if you are given an inert pill by your doctor (sugar wrapped around chalk, perhaps) and told it’s a powerful pain-killer then your headache goes away.
So powerful is this effect that people have been known to suffer from the side-effects of medicines they aren’t taking if they think they are. It might not cure cancer, for example, and I’m not suggesting sugar pills for diabetes for example, but as speaking anxiety is a psychological problem, as psychological solution seems fine to me 🙂
It’s also such a problem in research science that it’s one of the reasons scientists experimenting on people will try to keep the experiments double-blind, which means neither the experimenter or the experimentee knows if they’re being given the real drug or a fake version, so that the effects aren’t compromised by expectations and placebo effects.
In the light of this, one can see how the Power Posing method might work, even if there isn’t the biochemical effect on coritsol and testosterone cited in the research.
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