Stand like a superhero for two minutes before a job interview, and your body chemistry shifts to make you braver. That was the promise of one of the most-watched talks in TED’s history. The trouble is that the claim about your hormones did not hold up, and the scientist who first reported it later said she no longer believed it.
A quick note: We are writers and journalists, not psychologists or endocrinologists, and this piece is a reading of how one finding travelled, not advice about your own confidence or biology. The studies here are small and contested, and population-level results are not instructions for any individual reader.
By 2017 Amy Cuddy’s 2012 talk, “Your body language shapes who you are,” had been watched more than 39 million times. The count has since climbed past 70 million. The talk handed the world a two-minute ritual anyone could try in a bathroom mirror: stand tall, feel your hormones shift, walk in with more nerve. The science underneath it did not travel nearly as well.
The claim that spread everywhere
The talk rested on a 2010 paper by Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy and Andy Yap. Holding an expansive, high-power pose for two minutes, they reported, raised testosterone, lowered cortisol (a stress hormone), made people more willing to take risks, and left them feeling more powerful. It was a tidy story: change your body, change your chemistry, change your nerve.
The evidence was thin. The paper was built on 42 participants, a small group for a claim about hormones, and small groups are exactly where random noise can look like a real result. Still, the idea had a hook. Anyone who has stood a little taller before a hard conversation already half-believed it, and the TED stage handed that instinct a lab result to lean on.
Where the science broke down
Starting in 2015, larger studies went looking for the effect and mostly could not find it. The most cited attempt came from Eva Ranehill and colleagues at the University of Zurich, working with 200 participants. The feeling of power held up. The bodily claims did not: no change in hormones, no change in risk-taking.
Later, more carefully planned studies pointed the same way. A whole journal issue devoted to power posing found essentially no effect on hormones or behaviour.
Then the study’s own lead author stepped away from it. In September 2016, Dana Carney posted a statement saying plainly, “I do not have any faith in the embodied effects of ‘power poses.’” It is rare for a scientist to publicly walk back a headline finding of her own, rarer still one that had reached tens of millions of people. The change reached her teaching too. “I do not teach power poses in my classes anymore,” she noted.
What survived the wreckage
Not everything collapsed. One result kept holding up, and it was the softest one: people who strike big, open poses tend to say they feel more powerful afterwards. Cuddy has kept defending that narrower claim.
In a 2017 Q&A she argued that “the key finding is simple: adopting expansive postures causes people to feel more powerful.” That is a claim about how people say they feel, and it stands on far firmer ground than the hormone story.
On the biology, even Cuddy has pulled back. She has said the “current body of evidence regarding hormones effects is mixed, so I am currently agnostic about how posture affects hormones.” She has also moved away from the superhero image the talk made famous, arguing that “it’s not just about standing like a superhero for two minutes; it’s about carrying yourself with power and pride and poise, as you deserve to do.” That is a motivational message, not a proven effect, and it reads more honestly as one.
How a finding outruns its correction
The power-pose story is now a standard example of what psychologists call the replication crisis: the discovery that many published results fall apart when tested again.
A single small study can become a global habit. Undoing it is slower, quieter work.
There is a real dispute buried in all this. Cuddy has pointed out that people in the failed replication held their poses for six minutes rather than two, one of several differences she says make a direct comparison harder. Nobody behaved badly, necessarily. The correction simply never travels as far as the claim did.
The talk has been watched tens of millions of times, and the number keeps rising. Carney’s disavowal reached a tiny fraction of that audience.
