Power Posing: Amy Cuddy, Body Language, Replication, and What the Evidence Shows
Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: September 24, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Power posing became one of the most famous ideas in modern social psychology: adopt an expansive, “powerful” posture for a short time, and the body may feed back into the mind, making you feel more powerful and perhaps changing hormones, risk-taking, performance, or behavior. The current evidence supports a much narrower conclusion. Body position can influence some self-reported affective states, and under some conditions it may influence behavior, but the original package of claims about testosterone, cortisol, risk tolerance, and broad real-world success has not been robustly replicated. Large reviews find no reliable physiological effect, and behavioral effects are substantially less secure than popular accounts once publication bias, outliers, neutral controls, and demand characteristics are considered (Körner et al., 2022; Elkjær et al., 2022).
That distinction matters because “power posing” is often collapsed into “body language.” They are not the same question. Body language research asks, among other things, what posture communicates to observers. Power-posing research asks whether deliberately adopting a posture changes the person who adopts it. Expansive displays can communicate dominance or rank to other people even if briefly posing that way does not reliably transform the poser’s endocrine system or guarantee better performance (Hall, Coats, & Smith LeBeau, 2005; Witkower et al., 2020).
The scientific story is therefore more interesting than either viral slogan: “stand like a superhero and become powerful,” or the equally crude reversal, “power posing was completely debunked.” The 2010 findings did trigger serious replication failures and methodological criticism, but later meta-analyses also found nonzero effects in some domains. The central task is to separate outcomes, comparison conditions, research designs, and theoretical meanings instead of treating “power posing” as one indivisible effect.
Power Posing: The Short Answer
Does power posing work? The answer depends on what “work” means. If the claim is that two minutes of expansive posing reliably raises testosterone, lowers cortisol, increases risk-taking, and produces a generalized state of power, the evidence does not support that strong claim. A preregistered meta-analysis of body-position research found effects on self-report and some behavioral outcomes but not physiological outcomes, while warning that behavioral effects were sensitive to publication bias and outliers (Körner et al., 2022).
If the claim is narrower—posture can influence how people feel—there is more support. A Bayesian meta-analysis of six preregistered studies found evidence for an effect on felt power, although the evidence weakened when analyses were restricted to participants who were unfamiliar with the power-pose hypothesis (Gronau et al., 2017). A broader systematic review of 73 studies also found differences between expansive and contractive motor displays on affective and overt behavioral responses (Elkjær et al., 2022).
The most important qualification is that an expansive-versus-contractive comparison does not tell us whether expansion helps, contraction hurts, or both. When neutral conditions were examined in the 73-study review, the pattern was driven mainly by contractive displays relative to neutral displays (Hedges’s g = 0.45), whereas expansive displays differed little from neutral displays (g = 0.06) (Elkjær et al., 2022). That is a major reason the modern evidence should not be summarized as “expansive power poses give people a psychological boost.”
What Is Power Posing?
Power posing is an experimental and popular-psychology practice in which a person deliberately adopts an expansive body position associated with power or dominance, usually for a brief period. In the original paradigm, “high-power” poses involved taking up more space and keeping the limbs relatively open, whereas “low-power” poses involved making the body smaller and more contractive (Carney, Cuddy, & Yap, 2010).
The classic manipulation was not simply “stand up straight.” Power poses were intentionally expansive and often high-intensity. Later scholarship has argued that this matters theoretically: highly expansive poses may be better understood as displays associated with dominance, while upright but less expansive postures may map more closely onto prestige-related signals (Körner & Schütz, 2020; Körner et al., 2022). For the broader distinction between dominance and prestige, see Dominance vs Prestige: Two Routes to Status, Influence, and Leadership.
This is also why “power pose,” “confident posture,” “upright posture,” and “body language” should not be used as interchangeable labels. They overlap, but different studies manipulate different physical configurations and measure different outcomes. A finding about slumping cannot automatically be generalized to a superhero pose, and a finding about how observers perceive expansion cannot automatically be generalized to how the person posing will feel or behave.
Power Posing Is Not the Same as Social Power, Status, or Authority
The word “power” in power posing is metaphorically and behaviorally connected to social rank, but adopting an expansive posture does not give someone social power in the psychological sense. Social power concerns asymmetric dependence and the capacity to influence another person’s outcomes, resources, options, rewards, or constraints. For the construct itself, see Social Power: Definition, Types, French and Raven, Keltner, and Modern Psychology.
Power is also distinct from status, which concerns respect, prestige, or social standing. Expansive postures may be read as cues of dominance or rank, yet that does not mean the poser possesses actual power, legitimate authority, prestige, or control over valued resources. The distinction is central to interpreting the literature because many power-pose outcomes measure subjective feelings of power rather than actual interpersonal power. See Power vs Status: Social Power, Prestige, Dominance, and Hierarchy.
The 2010 Study That Launched the Idea
The modern power-posing controversy begins with Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy, and Andy Yap’s 2010 paper in Psychological Science. Forty-two participants were randomly assigned to high-power or low-power pose conditions. An experimenter physically positioned each participant into two poses, held for one minute each. The researchers collected saliva before and after the manipulation, measured self-reported feelings of power, and used a gambling decision to index risk-taking (Carney, Cuddy, & Yap, 2010).
The study reported a striking pattern: compared with low-power posers, high-power posers showed higher testosterone, lower cortisol, greater self-reported power, and greater willingness to take a monetary risk. The authors concluded that brief nonverbal displays could produce psychological, physiological, and behavioral changes associated with power (Carney, Cuddy, & Yap, 2010).
The result was compelling partly because it crossed levels of analysis. A tiny behavioral intervention appeared to shift subjective experience, hormones, and decision-making in the same direction. That coherence made the finding intuitively attractive and highly portable. It also made the claim unusually demanding scientifically: each part of the proposed package—feelings, hormones, behavior, and real-world implications—needed independent replication.
How Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk Changed the Scale of the Claim
Amy Cuddy’s 2012 TEDGlobal talk, “Your body language may shape who you are”, brought the idea to a global audience. The talk framed power posing as a practical strategy for moments when people feel vulnerable or evaluated and connected posture to confidence, hormones, and consequential performance. TED’s current page explicitly notes the subsequent scientific debate about robustness and reproducibility.
The talk’s cultural impact is part of the scientific history because it converted an early laboratory result into a widely practiced self-help intervention before the evidence base had matured. This does not change what the original experiment found; it changes the stakes of interpretation. Once millions of people are told that a two-minute posture may change hormones or success, replication becomes more than an internal methodological question.
The First Major Replication: Ranehill et al. (2015)
A much larger replication by Eva Ranehill and colleagues tested 200 participants and found no effect of high-power versus low-power posing on testosterone, cortisol, or risk-taking. It did find a difference in self-reported feelings of power, preserving one component of the original result while failing to reproduce the hormonal and behavioral pattern (Ranehill et al., 2015).
This result immediately changed the evidential landscape. It suggested that the original finding should be disaggregated: “felt power” might be more replicable than endocrine changes or risk behavior. That separation became a recurring theme in later preregistered studies and meta-analyses.
Ranehill et al. also illustrate a broader point about replication. A failed replication does not prove that every possible posture effect is zero; it challenges the generality and estimated size of a specific claim under a specified design. The scientifically relevant question then becomes which outcomes survive across better-powered studies and different methods.
What the Preregistered Replications Found
In 2017, Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology published a special issue built around preregistered power-pose studies. Preregistration matters because hypotheses, outcomes, and analysis plans are specified before results are known, reducing opportunities to select analyses after seeing the data.
A Bayesian model-averaged meta-analysis of six preregistered studies from that special issue focused specifically on felt power. It reported very strong evidence for an effect when the studies were analyzed as reported. When the analysis was restricted to participants unfamiliar with the power-pose effect, evidence dropped to moderate (Gronau et al., 2017). That pattern is important because familiarity can increase the chance that participants infer what a study is trying to produce.
The special issue did not restore the original hormonal and behavioral package. Its editors emphasized that the project was informative precisely because preregistered studies can show a differentiated result rather than forcing a single yes-or-no verdict (Jonas et al., 2017).
P-Curves, Publication Bias, and the Disagreement About Felt Power
The power-posing debate also became a debate about how evidence should be aggregated. Simmons and Simonsohn used p-curve analysis to argue that the published literature did not provide convincing evidential value for power posing beyond the original study’s manipulation check and raised concerns about selective publication and analysis (Simmons & Simonsohn, 2017).
Cuddy, Schultz, and Fosse responded with a broader p-curve analysis that included a larger body of postural-feedback studies and argued that the literature contained evidential value, especially for affective outcomes such as feelings of power (Cuddy, Schultz, & Fosse, 2018). The disagreement was partly about which studies and outcomes belong in the evidential set, not merely about the arithmetic of one shared dataset.
For readers, the safest interpretation is outcome-specific. The controversy does not justify combining all dependent variables under one label. Felt power, mood, risk-taking, interview performance, testosterone, and cortisol are different outcomes with different replication histories.
What Meta-Analyses Show Today
Two large syntheses are especially useful because they move beyond individual headline studies. Elkjær and colleagues identified 73 studies on expansive and contractive motor displays. Körner and colleagues later meta-analyzed 313 effects from 88 studies involving 9,779 participants and explicitly separated high-power poses associated with dominance from upright postures associated with prestige (Elkjær et al., 2022; Körner et al., 2022).
Self-Reported Outcomes
Self-reported outcomes are the most consistently supported domain. Körner et al. found effects on self-report measures, and the preregistered Bayesian meta-analysis found evidence for changes in felt power (Gronau et al., 2017; Körner et al., 2022). This makes the claim “body position can influence subjective experience” more defensible than the claim “power poses transform physiology.”
Behavioral Outcomes
Behavioral outcomes are mixed. Körner et al. found an aggregate behavioral effect, but sensitivity analyses indicated that this estimate was affected by publication bias and/or outliers. The authors therefore treated behavioral conclusions more cautiously than the overall effect size might suggest (Körner et al., 2022).
Physiological Outcomes
Physiological outcomes are where the original popular story is weakest. The 2022 meta-analysis found no reliable effects on physiological measures, which include the hormonal outcomes that made the 2010 study famous (Körner et al., 2022). Multiple individual studies likewise failed to reproduce the original testosterone-and-cortisol pattern (Ranehill et al., 2015; Smith & Apicella, 2017).
The Neutral-Control Problem: Is Expansion Helping, or Is Contraction Hurting?
A two-condition design comparing expansive with contractive poses cannot identify which side produces the difference. Imagine that expansive posture leaves a person unchanged while an unusually contracted posture makes them feel worse. An expansive-versus-contractive contrast would still favor expansion, even though expansion itself produced no benefit.
Elkjær et al. directly addressed this issue by examining studies with neutral controls. Their meta-analysis found a substantial contractive-versus-neutral difference (g = 0.45) but a very small expansive-versus-neutral difference (g = 0.06) (Elkjær et al., 2022). In that synthesis, much of the apparent expansive-versus-contractive advantage looked more like a cost of contraction than a boost from expansion.
This is one of the clearest reasons to avoid the phrase “power poses make you powerful.” A contrast effect can be real without supporting the intervention story attached to one side of the contrast.
Does Power Posing Change Testosterone or Cortisol?
The original 2010 study reported increased testosterone and decreased cortisol after high-power posing relative to low-power posing (Carney, Cuddy, & Yap, 2010). That claim attracted enormous attention because it implied that a brief posture could rapidly alter endocrine markers associated with dominance and stress.
The hormonal result did not survive well. Ranehill et al. found no effect on either hormone in a much larger sample, and Smith and Apicella found no main effect of pose on testosterone or cortisol in 247 men tested around a competitive context (Ranehill et al., 2015; Smith & Apicella, 2017). The 2022 meta-analysis likewise reported no aggregate physiological effect (Körner et al., 2022).
A 2024 randomized study by Barel and colleagues revisited the question with 92 young adults. It did not replicate the original testosterone effect or the effect on feelings of power, while reporting partial findings involving cortisol, risk tolerance, and estradiol in a subgroup. The authors treated these findings cautiously rather than as a restoration of the original endocrine model (Barel et al., 2024). One positive or partial study does not outweigh the broader pattern of null physiological evidence.
Does Power Posing Increase Confidence or Felt Power?
This is the strongest surviving part of the literature, but even here wording matters. Studies typically measure transient self-reported states such as felt power, affect, pride, or confidence-like judgments. They do not establish that a brief pose changes a stable personality trait, self-esteem in general, social rank, or actual power over others.
The preregistered Bayesian meta-analysis found evidence for felt power, and broader meta-analyses found effects on self-report outcomes (Gronau et al., 2017; Körner et al., 2022). Yet the size and interpretation of these effects depend on design. Effects were larger in designs more vulnerable to participants inferring the study’s purpose, and neutral-control analyses suggest that avoiding contractive posture may matter more than adopting an exaggerated expansive pose (Elkjær et al., 2022; Körner et al., 2022).
So “power posing can make some people report feeling more powerful in some experimental contexts” is much closer to the evidence than “power posing boosts confidence” as a general personal-development rule.
Does Power Posing Improve Job Interview Performance?
A 2015 study by Cuddy, Caroline Wilmuth, Andy Yap, and Dana Carney tested preparatory posing before a mock job interview. Participants posed privately, then delivered an interview speech. The authors reported better performance and hireability judgments after high-power posing, with the effect interpreted as operating through nonverbal presence rather than verbal content (Cuddy et al., 2015).
That finding should not be treated as a settled interview intervention. A preregistered replication and extension found no significant main effects of power posing on behavioral dominance, social sensitivity, or the key hireability pathway from the earlier study (Klaschinski, Schnabel, & Schröder-Abé, 2017). A correction to the original job-interview article was also published in 2018 (Journal of Applied Psychology correction).
The practical conclusion is straightforward: power posing is not an evidence-based substitute for interview preparation. A person may use posture as a private ritual if it feels useful or grounding, but the research does not justify promising improved hiring outcomes.
Power Posing vs. Body Language: A Crucial Distinction
Body language can matter even if the strongest power-pose claims fail. Decades of nonverbal research show that cues such as posture, gaze, movement, interpersonal distance, and vocal behavior are related to how dominance, power, and status are perceived and expressed (Hall, Coats, & Smith LeBeau, 2005).
More recent work shows that dominance and prestige are associated with distinguishable nonverbal displays. In seven studies, Witkower and colleagues found that dominance was associated with more grandiose space-taking and distinct facial and head-position cues, while prestige was communicated through a different constellation of signals (Witkower et al., 2020).
These findings concern communication and social perception. They do not demonstrate that deliberately copying a dominance display will create genuine prestige, social power, competence, or endocrine change. The direction of inference is different: observers can read a cue without the cue acting as a reliable internal intervention for the person producing it.
Dominance vs. Prestige: Why Posture Type Matters
A major conceptual advance in this literature has been to stop treating every “confident” body position as the same manipulation. Körner and Schütz proposed distinguishing expansive power poses from upright postures using the dominance–prestige framework (Körner & Schütz, 2020).
Highly expansive, space-taking poses resemble signals of dominance. Upright posture can involve vertical extension without the same level of horizontal expansion and may be interpreted more as prestige-related or competent presentation. The 2022 meta-analysis adopted this distinction and found that both categories could affect self-report and some behavior, but not physiology (Körner et al., 2022).
This distinction also protects against a common category error: dominance is one route to rank, prestige another, and social power itself is a separate relational construct. The cluster article Dominance vs Prestige: Two Routes to Status, Influence, and Leadership develops that difference in detail.
Demand Characteristics, Expectations, and Participant Awareness
Power-posing experiments are unusually vulnerable to demand characteristics because the manipulation is visible and meaningful. Participants know they are being asked to spread out, stand tall, slump, contract, or take up space. If they infer that the researcher expects confidence, dominance, or positive affect, their self-reports can shift even when no deeper physiological mechanism is involved.
The 2022 meta-analysis found larger effects in studies without cover stories and in within-subject designs, a pattern the authors interpreted as consistent with demand characteristics contributing to results (Körner et al., 2022). The preregistered Bayesian meta-analysis likewise found that the evidence for felt power was weaker when restricting analysis to participants unfamiliar with the effect (Gronau et al., 2017).
Demand effects do not automatically make a subjective experience “fake.” If someone expects a posture to make them feel bolder and then reports feeling bolder, that experience may be psychologically real. The scientific issue is causal interpretation: whether the effect reflects a specific embodied mechanism, an expectancy effect, task interpretation, comparison with an uncomfortable contracted posture, or some combination.
What Later Studies Add: 2024–2026
Recent work has kept the field alive while making it more precise. A 2024 study by Mikkelsen and colleagues compared expansive and contractive postures with active and passive control conditions across sadness and fear contexts. Primary behavioral outcomes were not significant, while some affective outcomes differed, again fitting a pattern in which emotional self-report is more responsive than broad behavioral performance (Mikkelsen et al., 2024).
The 2024 Barel study reopened hormonal measurement but did not reproduce the original testosterone or felt-power findings; its partial cortisol, risk, and estradiol results require replication before they can support a general mechanism (Barel et al., 2024).
In 2026, Wainio-Theberge and Armony used environmental constraints to induce posture more incidentally, reducing awareness of the manipulation. They reported effects on risk-taking and aspects of mood, including pride, and argued that naturally induced posture may influence behavior even when participants are less aware of being experimentally posed (Wainio-Theberge & Armony, 2026). This is important evidence for postural feedback, but it does not retroactively validate the original two-minute hormonal claim. It tests a different, more naturalistic manipulation.
So, Was Power Posing “Debunked”?
The word “debunked” is too coarse for the evidence. The strong popular version of the 2010 claim—brief expansive posing reliably causes a coordinated shift in hormones, subjective power, risk-taking, and success—has not held up. The hormonal component in particular lacks reliable support in the larger literature (Ranehill et al., 2015; Körner et al., 2022).
At the same time, the broader proposition that body position can influence psychological experience has empirical support. Self-reported affective effects recur in meta-analyses, and some behavioral effects appear under particular conditions. The literature has moved from an all-in-one “power pose effect” toward a more differentiated postural-feedback question: which body positions influence which outcomes, compared with what baseline, through what mechanisms, and under what level of participant awareness?
Dana Carney, the first author of the 2010 paper, publicly changed her own position in 2016 and wrote that she no longer believed the original power-pose effects were real (Carney, 2016). Amy Cuddy has continued to argue for a narrower postural-feedback effect, especially on feelings of power, and points to later meta-analytic evidence (Cuddy, Schultz, & Fosse, 2018). The disagreement is best understood by specifying which outcome is under discussion.
What You Can Reasonably Do With the Evidence
If an expansive or upright posture makes you feel more ready before a difficult conversation, presentation, or interview, using it as a personal routine is compatible with the evidence. The strongest justification is subjective preparation, not endocrine transformation or guaranteed performance.
Avoid treating extreme contraction as a necessary control or training strategy. The neutral-control literature suggests that some classic effects may reflect the disadvantages of contractive posture rather than special benefits of expansive posing (Elkjær et al., 2022).
For high-stakes performance, posture should sit downstream of preparation rather than replace it. The evidence does not support telling candidates that two minutes in a superhero pose will materially improve hiring outcomes. The replication literature is too mixed for that promise (Cuddy et al., 2015; Klaschinski, Schnabel, & Schröder-Abé, 2017).
Finally, do not interpret momentary feelings of power as actual social power. Feeling more agentic, open, or assertive is a psychological state; power over others depends on relationships, resources, alternatives, institutions, and dependence. The distinction is developed in Social Power: Definition, Types, French and Raven, Keltner, and Modern Psychology.
Why Power Posing Became a Replication-Crisis Case Study
Power posing became a symbol of psychology’s replication debate because it combined several features that make scientific claims culturally explosive: a small original sample, a dramatic multilevel result, an intuitive mechanism, a simple intervention, prestigious publication, and extraordinary media reach.
The later scientific process also displayed many of the corrective mechanisms modern psychology increasingly values: larger samples, direct and conceptual replications, preregistration, special issues organized around replication, public data, competing meta-analyses, sensitivity analyses, neutral controls, and explicit attention to demand characteristics.
That process did not produce one theatrical verdict. It produced a more granular map. Hormonal claims weakened substantially. Felt-power effects remained more plausible. Behavioral effects became conditional and method-sensitive. Neutral-control analyses changed what “positive effect” meant. Newer naturalistic manipulations reopened specific questions without restoring the original broad claim.
For psychological science, this is the deeper lesson: replication is not merely a courtroom appeal that declares an effect guilty or innocent. It changes the ontology of the claim. “Power posing” began as one compact phenomenon and matured into several separable questions about postural feedback, subjective experience, behavior, physiology, social signaling, expectancy, and experimental design.
Power Posing in the Psychology of Power
Power posing sits at the edge of the psychology of power rather than at its center. It studies a bodily display associated with power and asks whether performing that display feeds back into the actor. That is different from studying the consequences of possessing social power, controlling resources, occupying an authoritative role, or holding high status.
For the broader field, begin with Psychology of Power: Why We Seek It, How It Changes Us, From Nietzsche to Foucault. For the empirical question of whether possessing power changes behavior and morality, see Does Power Corrupt? Psychology, Morality, Behavior, and the Power Paradox. For power and risk-taking specifically, see Power and Risk Taking: Confidence, Approach Motivation, and Decision-Making. These are different canonical intents from the power-posing replication question.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does power posing actually work?
For broad claims about hormones, risk-taking, and real-world success, evidence is weak or inconsistent. For transient self-reported feelings and affect, evidence is stronger. Meta-analyses support some self-report effects while finding no reliable physiological effect and cautioning that behavioral effects are sensitive to bias and design (Körner et al., 2022).
Does power posing increase testosterone?
The original 2010 study reported an increase, but larger replications and the broader meta-analytic literature do not support a reliable testosterone effect (Ranehill et al., 2015; Körner et al., 2022; Barel et al., 2024).
Does power posing lower cortisol?
A consistent general cortisol-lowering effect has not been established. The original study reported one, Ranehill et al. did not replicate it, and the 2022 meta-analysis found no reliable physiological effect overall. A 2024 study reported partial cortisol-related findings, which require further replication (Ranehill et al., 2015; Barel et al., 2024; Körner et al., 2022).
Can power posing make you feel more confident?
It may change some short-term self-reported states, especially when expansive and contractive conditions are contrasted. But “confidence” is broader than the felt-power measures used in many experiments, and neutral-control evidence suggests that contraction may account for more of the contrast than expansion itself (Gronau et al., 2017; Elkjær et al., 2022).
Should I power pose before a job interview?
You can use posture as a personal preparation ritual if it feels helpful, but research does not establish that power posing reliably improves interview performance or hireability. The original positive job-interview finding was not reproduced in a preregistered replication and extension (Cuddy et al., 2015; Klaschinski, Schnabel, & Schröder-Abé, 2017).
Is power posing the same as good posture?
No. Classic power poses emphasize expansiveness and space-taking. Upright posture emphasizes spinal and vertical extension and may have different psychological and social meanings. Contemporary reviews distinguish these categories rather than treating them as one intervention (Körner & Schütz, 2020).
Is body language scientifically real if power posing is controversial?
Yes. Nonverbal communication is a broad research field, and posture is one of many cues people use to express and infer dominance, status, affect, and social intention. Evidence that observers read bodily expansion as a dominance-related signal does not require the claim that deliberately adopting expansion reliably changes the poser’s hormones (Hall, Coats, & Smith LeBeau, 2005; Witkower et al., 2020).
Did Amy Cuddy invent power posing?
The modern experimental “power posing” claim was introduced in the 2010 paper by Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy, and Andy Yap and was popularized globally by Cuddy’s 2012 TED talk. Research on posture, nonverbal dominance, embodiment, and social signaling predates that paper by decades (Carney, Cuddy, & Yap, 2010; TED, 2012).
What is the best current scientific summary?
Posture can influence psychological experience, but the original high-profile claim was too broad. Self-reported affective effects have more support than hormonal effects; behavioral evidence is mixed and method-sensitive; neutral controls often weaken the case for a special benefit of expansive poses; and newer studies suggest that naturalistic posture may still affect mood or behavior under specific conditions (Elkjær et al., 2022; Körner et al., 2022; Wainio-Theberge & Armony, 2026).
Related Articles
References
Barel, E., Shahrabani, S., Mahagna, L., Massalha, R., Colodner, R., & Tzischinsky, O. (2024). The effects of power posing on neuroendocrine levels and risk-taking. BMC Psychology, 12, 726. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-024-02194-7
Carney, D. R., Cuddy, A. J. C., & Yap, A. J. (2010). Power posing: Brief nonverbal displays affect neuroendocrine levels and risk tolerance. Psychological Science, 21(10), 1363–1368. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610383437
Carney, D. R., Cuddy, A. J. C., & Yap, A. J. (2015). Review and summary of research on the embodied effects of expansive (vs. contractive) nonverbal displays. Psychological Science, 26(5), 657–663. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614566855
Carney, D. R. (2016). My position on “Power Poses.” University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business. https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/dana_carney/pdf_My%20position%20on%20power%20poses.pdf
Cuddy, A. J. C., Wilmuth, C. A., Yap, A. J., & Carney, D. R. (2015). Preparatory power posing affects nonverbal presence and job interview performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(4), 1286–1295. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038543
Cuddy, A. J. C., Schultz, S. J., & Fosse, N. E. (2018). P-curving a more comprehensive body of research on postural feedback reveals clear evidential value for power-posing effects: Reply to Simmons and Simonsohn (2017). Psychological Science, 29(4), 656–666. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617746749
Elkjær, E., Mikkelsen, M. B., Michalak, J., Mennin, D. S., & O’Toole, M. S. (2022). Expansive and contractive postures and movement: A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effect of motor displays on affective and behavioral responses. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(1), 276–304. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620919358
Gronau, Q. F., van Erp, S., Heck, D. W., Cesario, J., Jonas, K. J., & Wagenmakers, E.-J. (2017). A Bayesian model-averaged meta-analysis of the power pose effect with informed and default priors: The case of felt power. Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology, 2(1), 123–138. https://doi.org/10.1080/23743603.2017.1326760
Hall, J. A., Coats, E. J., & Smith LeBeau, L. (2005). Nonverbal behavior and the vertical dimension of social relations: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 131(6), 898–924. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.131.6.898
Jonas, K. J., Cesario, J., Alger, M., Bailey, A. H., Bombari, D., Carney, D., et al. (2017). Power poses—Where do we stand? Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology, 2(1), 139–141. https://doi.org/10.1080/23743603.2017.1342447
Klaschinski, L., Schnabel, K., & Schröder-Abé, M. (2017). Benefits of power posing: Effects on dominance and social sensitivity. Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology, 2(1), 55–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/23743603.2016.1248080
Körner, R., & Schütz, A. (2020). Dominance or prestige: A review of the effects of power poses and other body postures. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 14(8), e12559. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12559
Körner, R., Röseler, L., Schütz, A., & Bushman, B. J. (2022). Dominance and prestige: Meta-analytic review of experimentally induced body position effects on behavioral, self-report, and physiological dependent variables. Psychological Bulletin, 148(1–2), 67–85. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000356
Mikkelsen, M. B., Tramm, G., Michalak, J., Mennin, D. S., Elkjær, E., & O’Toole, M. S. (2024). Bodies in action: Do contractive and expansive postures facilitate adaptive behavior? Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 65(5), 966–979. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjop.13046
Ranehill, E., Dreber, A., Johannesson, M., Leiberg, S., Sul, S., & Weber, R. A. (2015). Assessing the robustness of power posing: No effect on hormones and risk tolerance in a large sample of men and women. Psychological Science, 26(5), 653–656. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614553946
Simmons, J. P., & Simonsohn, U. (2017). Power posing: P-curving the evidence. Psychological Science, 28(5), 687–693. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616658563
Smith, K. M., & Apicella, C. L. (2017). Winners, losers, and posers: The effect of power poses on testosterone and risk-taking following competition. Hormones and Behavior, 92, 172–181. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2016.11.003
Wainio-Theberge, S., & Armony, J. (2026). Manipulating posture implicitly through environmental constraints influences mood and risk-taking behaviour. British Journal of Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.70083
Witkower, Z., Tracy, J. L., Cheng, J. T., & Henrich, J. (2020). Two signals of social rank: Prestige and dominance are associated with distinct nonverbal displays. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118(1), 89–120. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000181