Does power posing work? What the evidence supports

Standing with your hands on your hips might make you feel different. That does not mean it changes your hormones, improves your judgment, or helps you get a job.

The evidence on power posing is clearest when you take those claims one at a time. The original claims about testosterone, cortisol and risk-taking have not held up in replications. One 2026 study from a single lab, not preregistered, found that sitting upright rather than hunched changed risk-taking over the course of a game; it needs independent replication. Short-term changes in how people describe their feelings have more support. But the few studies that also included an ordinary, neutral posture suggest a twist: slumping lowers feelings and behavior compared with that neutral posture, while a power pose adds little. The evidence that a brief pose produces useful changes in everyday performance is much less convincing.

That distinction matters if you are deciding whether to strike a pose before a difficult conversation or presentation. A personal ritual is one thing. A demonstrated way to perform better is another.

What the original study claimed

In 2010, Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy, and Andy Yap reported that holding expansive poses, rather than contracted ones, changed participants' hormones, feelings of power, and willingness to take a financial risk. The appeal was obvious: two one-minute poses appeared to produce several desirable changes at once. The paper made a physiological claim as well as a psychological one. Original study.

The study compared groups assigned to different postures. It did not show that everyone who stood a certain way became more powerful. Nor did it measure the outcomes people often care about when they hear the advice: handling an interview, giving a clear presentation, or resolving a conflict.

Think about someone preparing for a salary discussion. Feeling more confident could help, make no difference, or even hurt, depending on what that confidence leads them to say. To show a practical benefit, a study would need to measure something closer to the actual goal. A change in a questionnaire score cannot answer that question on its own.

The larger replication separated the outcomes

In a 2015 conceptual replication, Eva Ranehill and colleagues tested 200 people, compared with 42 in the original study. Participants in expansive poses reported feeling more powerful, but the researchers did not find the predicted changes in testosterone, cortisol, or financial risk-taking. Replication paper.

The procedures were similar, not identical. Among other changes, participants held the poses for longer and received their instructions by computer, and the experimenter did not know which condition they were in. Differences like these matter when you ask why results disagree. They also raise a practical problem: if an intervention depends on a narrow set of unstated conditions, it is too early to advise people to use it anywhere.

The replication did not erase every result. It drew a useful line: changing posture could change how powerful people said they felt without producing the hormone and risk-taking effects originally attached to it.

Why “power posing works” is too broad

A 2022 review by Robert Körner and colleagues pooled studies of different body positions, including expansive poses and upright postures. It found effects on self-reports and behavioral measures, but not on physiological measures. Its sensitivity analyses suggested that the behavioral results were influenced by publication bias, unusually influential results, or both.

Effects were also noticeably larger in two kinds of study: those without a cover story, and those in which each participant tried more than one posture. Both designs make the hypothesis easier to guess. So the authors suggested that demand characteristics (participants responding to what they think the researcher expects) might partly explain the results. The review supports some posture effects, but it limits how confidently you can read the behavioral findings.

Keep self-reports, behavior and physiology separate. A single yes-or-no answer about all three hides the question you actually need answered. And a finding pooled across different body positions and tasks cannot show that one particular expansive pose will improve an interview or presentation.

There is another complication. Many posture experiments compare an expansive position with a contracted one. Suppose the expansive group feels better. Did expansion help, did contraction make people uncomfortable, or both? That comparison alone cannot tell you. Only a neutral comparison can separate those possibilities.

This is easy to miss because the advice is about adding something to ordinary life: “Stand this way and improve your confidence.” A study that compares two deliberately different positions may be answering a different question.

Two meta-analyses report results for the studies that did include a neutral comparison, and they point the same way (they draw partly on the same studies). Emma Elkjær and colleagues found that contractive postures produced worse outcomes than neutral ones (g = 0.45 across eight studies), while expansive postures barely differed from neutral (g = 0.06 across six studies). Elkjær and colleagues, 2022. Körner's review found the same pattern for self-reports and behavior: power poses and upright postures did not differ from control conditions (g = 0.02), while slumped postures fell below them (g = −0.22). Körner and colleagues, 2022.

In plain terms, the familiar contrast between a power pose and a slump mostly measures the cost of slumping. That is the reverse of what the popular advice assumes, which is that the pose adds something. Both estimates rest on small numbers of studies, and Elkjær and colleagues call for more research with neutral control groups.

Narrower laboratory work is still useful. In a 2025 laboratory study, Wainio-Theberge, Spiousas and Armony tracked changes in mood alongside measured body position and muscle activity. They reported relationships involving neck angle and how hard the posture was to hold. That is evidence about immediate experience and possible mechanisms. It does not show that the original hormone claims were right, or that the posture improves performance outside the laboratory.

What newer studies add

Read only its positive summary, and a 2024 study of hormones and risk-taking might look like a revival of the original finding. The results need a closer look. Among 92 participants, the researchers found no main effect of pose on testosterone, cortisol, reported power or risk-taking. They did find a statistical interaction involving cortisol change, posture and risk-taking.

An interaction is a narrower, conditional claim. It is not the same as saying that an expansive pose lowers cortisol or makes people more willing to take risks. Reporting it as confirmation of those claims would make the study sound more decisive than it was.

In 2026, two authors of the 2025 laboratory study approached risk-taking differently. Instead of instructing a pose, Soren Wainio-Theberge and Jorge Armony changed the furniture: a raised tablet led 96 participants to sit upright, while a low table made 99 others hunch over. Participants then played the Balloon Analogue Risk Task. Each pump of a virtual balloon adds in-game money to that round's pot, but if the balloon pops before the player cashes out, the round pays nothing. Over the course of the game, upright participants increased their pumping more than hunched participants did (p = .03 in the main model; a simpler slope analysis gave p = .02), although the overall difference between the groups fell short of significance (p = .06). Wainio-Theberge and Armony, 2026.

So the risk-taking question is not closed. But this is one study from one laboratory, with a mostly young, female sample, and the authors note that it was not preregistered. They found no overall effect of posture on mood. They also compared their groups with people from another study who used an ordinary desk. That comparison suggested that the upright group, not the hunched one, was the unusual group: the reverse of the meta-analytic pattern. But the desk group was not randomly assigned. A finding like this needs an independent replication before it can support advice.

Researchers have also tested posture instructions in everyday life. In a 2025 study, participants followed different instructions about how to hold their bodies (body-display instructions) before actions they planned to take. The study found no detectable advantage, either in taking those actions or in the feelings it measured. Only 127 of the 270 people initially recruited completed at least three weeks. That loss of participants limits how broadly the result applies. Still, the study gives little support for treating power posing as a dependable everyday performance tool.

Should you strike a pose before a presentation?

There is no need to turn an ordinary preference about posture into a scientific commitment. If a comfortable stance helps you settle before speaking, use it. What the research does not support is a promise of hormonal transformation, or the assumption that feeling powerful will make your next decision better. And if the neutral-comparison findings hold, the more useful advice is less about striking a pose than about not spending the minutes beforehand hunched over.

For a presentation, ask what success requires: knowing the material, explaining it clearly and handling questions. A posture exercise neither measures nor supplies those abilities. If you try a routine beforehand, judge it by those goals, not by how impressive its scientific explanation sounds.

Power posing is a good lesson in reading evidence, because parts of the original story can fail while narrower findings remain. The facial feedback evidence is another example: an unreliable demonstration can sit alongside better-supported findings from other procedures. Ask what changed, compared with what, and for how long. Then ask whether that change is the one you need.