In 2010, an influential study promoted the idea that so-called power poses—the adoption of wide-body positons (standing like Superman, for example) for one or two minutes—can make you feel powerful, risk-oriented, and increases the male sex hormone testosterone and decreases the stress hormone cortisol.
This study led to intense research on power poses. My colleagues and I were also intrigued by this simple technique and conducted research in which we found that power posing increased people's self-esteem. However, whereas some researchers found effects of power poses, others did not. This led to a huge controversy between advocates and critics.
To answer the question of whether the effects were real, we gathered together all the research on power posing. We considered two types of body positions to be relevant. The first was expansive body positions that reflect dominance, for example, standing or sitting in an expansive way and taking up as much space as possible. The second type included upright postures, for example, standing or sitting straight (versus slouched). That body position is understood as the nonverbal display of prestige.
In total, we collected data from 128 studies including more than 10,000 participants. The studies had been conducted between 1982 and 2022 mostly in the U.S. and Europe. Importantly, we included both published as well as unpublished studies, which we did by asking different scientific societies and individual researchers whether they had any unpublished research on the topic.
We examined three possible results of a power pose. The first was whether expansive body positions make people feel more self-confident, powerful, and in a better mood. The answer was yes. People who engaged in dominant poses felt somewhat more confident, powerful, and positive than people who stood or sat in a slumped or contracted way. For these and the following results there was no difference between expansive and upright body positions—both produced changes in people's self-perceptions.
Next, we tested whether these body positions affect actual behavior, for example, how action-oriented or risk-prone participants became through the poses. We did find an effect of body positions on behavior, but the findings were not very robust. In fact, after accounting for publication bias (that is, work not being published because it might have had disappointing results) the effect almost disappeared.
Finally, we tested for physiological effects: Do power poses impact hormones, blood pressure, or heart rate activity? We found hardly any effect of body positions in this domain.
We also found that the effects of body positions do not depend on age or gender, or whether participants are college students or not. Yet, we found somewhat larger effects in Western countries (such as the U.S. and Germany) than in Eastern countries (for example, Japan or Malaysia).
Unfortunately, most studies in our review did not include participants who engaged in a neutral body position. Thus, we can only speak with confidence to the difference between high and low power poses but not whether the difference between a high power pose and a neutral body position (or between a low power pose and a neutral body position) makes any difference. Future studies should clarify this important question.
So far, we know the adoption of expansive body positions for just one or two minutes can make people feel better. Thus, it seems justified to use the adoption of power poses or upright postures as a simple intervention technique. However, the effects are restricted to subjective experience. There is no effect on physiology, and it remains unclear whether the poses have the potential to change people's behavior.
For Further Reading
Briñol, P., Petty, R. E., & Wagner, B. (2009). Body posture effects on self-evaluation:
A self-validation approach. European Journal of Social Psychology, 39(6), 1053–1064. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.607
Körner, R., Röseler, L., Schütz, A., & Bushman, B. J. (2022). Dominance and prestige: Meta-analytic review of experimentally induced body position effects on behavioral, self-report, and physiological dependent variables. Psychological Bulletin, 148(1–2), 67–85. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000356
Körner, R., & Schütz, A. (2020). Dominance or prestige: A review of the effects of power poses and other body postures. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 14(8), e12559. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12559
Robert Körner is PhD student at the University of Halle-Wittenberg and research associate at the University of Bamberg. He studies social power.
Astrid Schütz is Professor of Personality and Assessment at the University of Bamberg. She studies personality and social interaction.
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