The poses take two minutes and fit inside a bathroom stall.
Stand wide, hands on hips, chin up: a superhero silhouette.
The claim that made them famous was never really about confidence.
It was about chemistry, and it was measured in spit: testosterone up, cortisol down.
Then better controlled labs went looking for that chemistry, and the saliva came back completely unchanged.
So what actually survives?
Why standing wide was supposed to change your blood chemistry
The proposed mechanism was borrowed from animal display research. Across many species, dominant individuals take up space while subordinate ones fold inward, and dominance tends to travel with higher testosterone and lower cortisol. Power posing ran that arrow backwards: adopt the expansive posture first, let the hormones follow, then let the feeling and the appetite for risk follow the hormones.
That loop was a hypothesis, not an established physiological pathway. It is also the exact piece of the claim that later work has struggled to reproduce. The softer half, the part about how the pose makes you feel, has fared considerably better.
Which raises the obvious question: if the feeling is real but the chemistry is not, what is the mechanism actually doing?
What the bigger saliva samples said back
A larger conceptual replication run at a Swiss university found that people who held expansive poses did report feeling more powerful afterwards. On the measures that made the finding famous, though, nothing happened at all. Testosterone, cortisol and financial risk taking showed no detectable effect.
The original authors answered in the same journal, arguing that the two protocols differed in ways that could matter and that those differences deserved a closer look. That is a legitimate objection, and it is how science is supposed to work. It also raised an obvious question about the pile of supportive results already in print.
So researchers went further back, to the number that started everything.
Forty two people, two hundred people and a flat distribution
The original 2010 experiment assigned 42 participants to hold two expansive or two contractive postures for a minute each, with saliva collected at baseline and again after the manipulation. The high power group showed higher testosterone, lower cortisol and more willingness to take a financial gamble. The talk that carried the result to the public became one of the most watched in TED’s history.
The Swiss replication used 200 participants with a near even mix of men and women, and reported statistical power above 95 percent to detect an effect the size of the original. Feelings of power replicated. The hormones and the behavior did not.
Two researchers then ran a p curve on the 33 supportive studies the original authors had cited in their reply. The distribution came out flat rather than right skewed, the pattern expected if the average effect were zero and only significant results reached print. They concluded the evidence was too weak to justify a search for moderators. Dana Carney, a co author of the original paper, later posted a public statement saying she no longer believes the effects are real.
That kind of self correction is rare, and it shifted the debate sharply.
The newest test measured more hormones than the first one
The most recent attempt tested 92 young adults at an American university, splitting the sample into men, women taking oral contraceptives and women who were not. Participants were randomly assigned to high or low power pose conditions, completed a risk taking task, and had their hormone levels measured at baseline and after the manipulation. Power posing again failed to reproduce the original testosterone result, and this time it did not move feelings of power either.
The team did report partial support on the other side: among high power posers, a decrease in cortisol was associated with risk tolerance. But they called the findings exploratory rather than settled, a meaningful distinction in a field still sorting out which effects are real.
One result pointed somewhere genuinely new. Among the women taking oral contraceptives, high power posing was followed by higher estradiol, an outcome the original study never measured.
What is still open, and what the saliva actually proved
The authors of the most recent paper treat the estradiol finding as a lead rather than a conclusion. Hormones and social context interact in complicated ways across different populations, and a null result on testosterone does not close every door. The power pose effect, understood narrowly as a shift in how confident a person feels, remains the one part of the original claim that better powered studies have consistently confirmed.
The broader dispute is not fully closed either. A later reanalysis by the talk’s author and colleagues widened the pool of postural feedback studies, counted self reported power as an outcome rather than a manipulation check, and reported clear evidential value. The p curve authors disagree, largely over which results belong in the analysis. As with a famous mock prison study halted after six days, a striking result can outrun the evidence that produced it, and a tool built on noisy data is only as good as the frames behind it.
What the full arc of evidence does close is the strongest version of the claim: that any adult can stand wide for two minutes and chemically shift into a bolder version of themselves. The feeling is real and repeatable. The measurable hormone shift is not, and that distinction matters every time someone cites the original number as settled science.
