Do Power Poses Really Improve Your Confidence?

Stand up straight, put your hands on your hips, spread your shoulders apart and tilt your chin up.

You are doing a power pose right now. According to some researchers, this should make you feel powerful, capable and confident. Do you feel it yet?

Here, Newsweek will explain exactly what power poses are and the hype behind them and dive into the research for and against them.

What Are Power Poses?

Power poses are physical stances meant to instill assertiveness and confidence. They involve more expansive and open-body positions.

One popular power pose that follows the principles of expansiveness and openness is the "Wonder Woman" stance. It mirrors Lynda Carter's iconic pose, with her hands on her hips, elbows pointed outwards, shoulders spread apart and feet planted in a wide stance.

While she was a professor at Harvard Business School, Amy Cuddy popularized power poses in a 2012 TED Talk. She based her presentation on several ideas in psychology:

• Body language influences how others see us. Confident body language projects power, and it can help us in situations like job interviews.
• Our body language can influence how we see ourselves. By carrying ourselves in certain ways or adopting certain stances, we can change how we think about ourselves.
• Some stances have innate positive associations. Cuddy pointed to victory poses in athletes as one example.

Combined, these ideas lead to the notion that power posing can significantly change our lives for the better.

Drawing on research and her firsthand experiences, Cuddy suggested that power posing could help with things like job interviews, stressful presentations and even imposter syndrome.

But what does science have to say about all this?

The Research Behind Power Posing

To study the effects of power poses, Cuddy and her team asked research subjects, split into two groups, to take on high- and low-power poses for one minute.

High-power poses were defined by increased openness and expansiveness. Low-power poses were the opposite: more closed and contracted postures.

The study had three main results:

• Those who adopted high-power poses had higher testosterone and lower cortisol, a stress hormone.
• They reported feeling more powerful.
• They were more prone to taking risks for significant rewards.

In a second study, Cuddy and her team again split subjects into two categories: high- and low-power posers. Subjects sat for a strenuous job interview and independent judges, who had no knowledge of the experiment, evaluated their performance.

High-power posers performed better in the job interviews across the board.

For Cuddy, this was compelling evidence that power posing works. However, in the years following her TED Talk, other researchers have explored power posing and its effects. They have come back with mixed results.

Early Doubts

The first blow came in 2015. Researchers from the University of Zurich published an attempt to replicate earlier findings on power posing. Unfortunately, they found no connection between power poses, hormone levels and more confident behaviors.

The study found support for improved feelings of power. But it cast doubt on power posing's ability to change our lives in meaningful ways, as Cuddy suggested in her TED talk.

Dana Carney, the lead researcher in the original posing research that Cuddy championed, fired back at the Zurich team. She and her co-authors pointed to some differences between the Zurich study and the original. Differences like how long participants held power poses, the timing of measurements and participant briefings.

Instead of resolving the questions about power posing, these papers ignited a debate across psychology that would last for years.

Replication Crisis

The debate over power poses came at a controversial time. Just as the issue was heating up, the field of psychology suffered a huge blow to its credibility.

In 2015, researchers published the results of their attempts to replicate 100 previously published and well-regarded studies. However, as Newsweek reported at the time, they successfully reproduced less than half of the results.

Power-posing research was not directly implicated in this analysis. However, the study sparked intense controversy over the validity of much psychological research. This compounded doubts about the research on power poses, paving the way for more critical studies in the years to come.

Power Posing Under Fire

The latter half of the 2010s saw a host of studies failing to replicate the original power-posing research. Try as they might, other scientists could not demonstrate hormonal or behavioral changes by using power poses.

The evidence was stacked so strongly against power posing that Carney published a personal statement on the issue in 2016. "I do not believe that 'power pose' effects are real," she wrote.

A More Nuanced Approach

A new issue came to light when Iowa State University's Marcus Credé pointed out that past research supporting the impact of power poses only compared high-power against low-power poses. Any apparent effect, Credé claimed in a 2019 paper, could be a difference between expansive and contracted stances—not a real benefit of power posing.

Following up on Credé's commentary, a large team under Aarhus University's Emma Elkjær analyzed previous studies on power posing. They looked for studies that compared high- and low-power stances against neutral postures.

The team found few results, but research that considered neutral stances vindicated Credé. Low-power poses—stances contracting the limbs inward and withdrawing oneself—led to increased cortisol, the stress hormone. However, high-power poses, like those Cuddy advocated for, had no impact.

Power Posing Revisited

Research on power poses continues, building on the more nuanced perspectives in Credé's and Elkjær's works.

In 2023, Hannah Metzler and a team of European researchers looked more closely at low-power poses. They found that people who used contracted stances tried avoiding angry individuals. High-power poses had no demonstrable effect.

However, Metzler and her crew seem wary of the controversial history surrounding power poses. "The present results emphasize the social function of power poses," they write, "but should be replicated before drawing strong conclusions."

Do Power Poses Actually Work?

After over a decade of research, a few things are clear:

• High-power poses do not change hormone levels. Despite evidence in this regard in the original 2010 paper, researchers could not replicate this effect.
• Power posing does not make you behave more powerfully. Studies have failed to replicate the behavioral effects of power posing.
• Contracted, low-power poses may have negative effects. Recent research has found negative hormonal and behavioral effects related to contracted stances.

So how should you change your behavior based on power-posing research? There are no definitive answers, but here are two things you can do today:

1. Consciously avoid contracted poses. These may emphasize feelings of weakness and vulnerability.
2. If power poses make you feel good, do them. In all the research on power posing, no one has found any negative effects. If they help you feel confident and powerful, there is no reason to stop doing them.

How to Actually Boost Your Confidence at Work

While the science behind power posing is debatable, there are a few science-backed things you can do to build confidence:

• Set goals. Clear, challenging and engaging goals can improve job performance and confidence, according to Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, who pioneered goal-setting theory.
• Get positive feedback. Hearing positive feedback from your managers and peers can improve self-confidence. Encourage teammates to share good things about you and vice versa, and let your manager know that you respond well to positive feedback.
• Be kind to yourself. The things we say to ourselves influence our self-perception. Practice positive self-talk like "I'm doing well" or "I can do this" to become more confident.
• Meditate. A study in the Journal of Evidence-Based Integrative Medicine found a connection between meditation and improved confidence, alongside other positive traits like self-compassion and well-being.
• Practice. A 2015 study found a connection between training simulations and clinical confidence in health care professionals. You might not be a heart surgeon, but you can still get more confident by practicing your skills.

Whether you use power poses or not, confidence can play a huge role in career success. Learn more about projecting confidence at work.