Amy Cuddy's power posing was a TED talk phenomenon — and the science collapsed

In 2010, Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy published a paper with Dana Carney and Andy Yap claiming that adopting 'power poses' — standing in expansive, open postures for two minutes — altered people's hormone levels, increasing testosterone and decreasing cortisol. The finding was striking: the body could change the mind, and the effect was nearly instant.

Cuddy's 2012 TED talk became one of the most-viewed of all time, with over 50 million views. The concept spread rapidly into corporate training programs, leadership development, and self-help books. Companies spent millions teaching employees to adopt power poses before important meetings, job interviews, and negotiations.

Replication attempts began to fail. A 2015 large-scale replication found no effect on hormones. In 2016, Dana Carney publicly disavowed the findings. The controversy became a defining case in the replication crisis. Cuddy left Harvard in 2017. The original finding is now widely considered not to hold.

The appealing finding spread faster than replications could catch up, so millions were spent on ineffective training before the science collapsed.

The finding was too appealing to fact-check — a one-minute trick that makes you more powerful matched the self-help narrative perfectly, so the TED talk spread faster than the replications caught up.

The original sample was small (42 participants) and the hormone measurements were noisy, making the result the kind of false positive that the replication crisis later exposed across psychology.

Cuddy's Harvard status and the TED talk's popularity created a reputation shield — critics were framed as attacking her personally rather than evaluating the science, delaying the correction.

A single study from Harvard, amplified by a viral TED talk, became a corporate training industry before anyone checked the science. The replication crisis caught up, but the training was already sold.