Somewhere right now, a person is locked in an office bathroom stall with their hands on their hips, elbows out, chin lifted, quietly holding the Wonder Woman pose before a job interview. They learned it from a TED talk, or from someone who learned it from the TED talk. Two minutes, they were told. Your testosterone rises, your cortisol falls, and you walk back out a slightly braver person.
Here's what they were never told: the claim collapsed. The hormone effects failed to replicate in larger studies, the behavioral effects mostly evaporated, and in 2016 the lead author of the original paper, Berkeley's Dana Carney, publicly stated that she does not believe power pose effects are real. What's left after a decade of scientific trench warfare is one narrow, contested finding: striking an expansive posture might make you feel a bit more powerful. That, plus a quieter plot twist about slouching that's arguably more useful than the original claim ever was.
If you've been power posing before big moments, you're not gullible. You were handed one of the most successful pieces of pop psychology of the century. But the version you got was the 2012 version, and the science kept moving after everyone stopped watching.
Where the myth came from
The origin is a 2010 study in Psychological Science by Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy, and Andy Yap. Forty-two participants held either "high-power" poses (expansive, open, taking up space) or "low-power" poses (contracted, closed) for a couple of minutes, and gave saliva samples before and after. The high-power posers, the paper reported, showed elevated testosterone, lowered cortisol, more willingness to gamble on a risk task, and stronger feelings of power.
Forty-two people. Two minutes. A finding that would reshape how a generation walked into rooms.
Because then came the talk. Cuddy's 2012 TED talk on body language became a phenomenon. Forbes noted it had racked up more than 46 million views and stood as TED's second-most-popular talk ever. And honestly, of course it did. The advice was free, private, took two minutes, and required confessing nothing to anyone. It promised you could smuggle confidence into your body through the side door. Who wouldn't want that to be true?
I wanted it to be true. I did the pose. In 2015, in a stairwell, before a salary conversation I was dreading. I remember feeling mostly like a person doing a weird thing in a stairwell.
What the replications found
In 2015, a team led by Eva Ranehill ran a much larger conceptual replication, also published in Psychological Science. One thing replicated: people who held expansive poses reported feeling more powerful. Everything else didn't. No testosterone effect. No cortisol effect. No difference in risk-taking behavior. The subjective glow survived; the biology and the behavior did not.
Then the story took a turn that almost never happens in science. In 2016, Carney, the original paper's first author, posted a statement walking away from her own finding. "I do not believe that 'power pose' effects are real," she wrote, detailing problems with how the original study's small sample had been collected and analyzed. Read that again. The scientist whose name sits first on the paper told the world to stop believing it.
The statisticians piled on next. Joseph Simmons and Uri Simonsohn ran a p-curve analysis of the power posing literature in 2017 and concluded that once you account for selective reporting (the field's habit of publishing the studies that worked and quietly shelving the ones that didn't), the published evidence doesn't actually suggest a real effect at all.
Cuddy didn't fold. In 2018 she and colleagues p-curved 55 experiments from more than 40 research teams and argued there's clear evidential value for exactly one outcome: expansive postures make people report feeling more powerful. Notice what's missing. Not hormones, not behavior. She even renamed the phenomenon "postural feedback," which tells you how far the claim retreated from its Wonder Woman era. Even the friendliest coverage conceded the point; Forbes ran the headline "Power Posing Is Back" and still had to admit the hormone claims remain unsupported.
And the story still isn't settling. A 2024 replication attempt in BMC Psychology failed to reproduce the testosterone effect and the feelings-of-power effect, finding only partial support for cortisol and risk-taking. Fourteen years in, the most generous summary is: inconsistent.
What actually survived (it's complicated, specifically)
Myth-busting pieces love a clean verdict, but the honest one here has three parts.
The hormone claim is dead. Nobody, including Cuddy, is seriously defending the idea that two minutes of posing shifts your testosterone or cortisol in any reliable way.
The performance claim is dead too, or at least on life support. There's no solid evidence that posing beforehand makes you interview better or negotiate harder. The thing everyone actually wanted from the pose is the thing with the least support.
What might be real is the smallest, most boring piece: holding an expansive posture may nudge how powerful you report feeling, a little, sometimes. And even that comes with an asterisk, because critics have pointed out that much of the overall effect may be driven not by expansive poses lifting you up but by contracted, slumped poses dragging you down. In other words, the studies compared superheroes to people folded into commas, and the commas may be doing the work.
Which would flip the advice entirely. Not "stand like Wonder Woman to gain power," but "maybe don't spend the twenty minutes before your interview hunched over your phone, spine curled, rereading the job listing for the ninth time." Less cinematic. Possibly more true.
There's a broader lesson here about how science reaches us, and it's the same one behind the ADHD strengths study everyone shared without reading: the version of a finding that goes viral is almost never the version that survives scrutiny. The TED talk got 46 million views. Carney's statement got a news cycle.
But I think the deeper problem with power posing was never the statistics. It was the theory of confidence underneath — that the feeling is a substance you can inject in a bathroom stall, two minutes before you need it, without ever looking at where the shakiness comes from. Real confidence tends to arrive the slower way: by noticing that your shoulders curl in before this meeting but not that one, that your voice goes up half an octave around this person, and getting curious about why. That kind of noticing is hard to do silently in your own head, which is part of why we built Joice. Saying "I always feel small before these check-ins" out loud, to something that asks a gentle question back, does more for the pattern than any pose ever did for your cortisol.
Keep the pose if you like it. Rituals are allowed, and a ritual that gets you to stand up and stop doomscrolling for two minutes is not nothing. Just know which part is the medicine. It was never the hands on your hips.
It was the two minutes you spent not shrinking.