The encyclopedia · R&D & Science · Strategic decision · 2010–2017
Amy Cuddy's power posing was a TED talk phenomenon — and the science collapsed
A Harvard study claimed power poses changed your hormones. One TED talk, 50M views, then corporate training — and the science never replicated.
Amy Cuddy · Dana Carney · Andy Yap · Harvard Business School · 2010-10-20
What happened
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.
Why it happened
- 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.
The lesson
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.
Sources
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