Topic
Power Posing
How the way you carry your body shapes the way you feel — what the science actually shows.
The core idea is simple, and it is well-supported: how you hold your body changes how you feel. Adopting expansive, open postures reliably increases people's sense of power and confidence. This phenomenon — postural feedback — is one of the more thoroughly studied and consistently replicated effects in this area of psychology.
In 2018, my colleagues and I published the most comprehensive review of this literature to date: a p-curve analysis of 55 experiments conducted by more than 40 independent research teams. The conclusion was clear. There is strong evidential value for the effect of expansive posture on how powerful people feel. The science holds.
Popular accounts have often flattened a careful scientific conversation into a headline. The distinction that gets lost is between the central, robust finding — posture affects your psychological state — and a narrower early claim about specific hormonal changes that simply needed more data. Examined as a whole, the body of research clearly supports the central insight, and I've documented it in detail across my peer-reviewed reviews of the field.
What the research shows
Key insights
The well-supported finding
Adopting expansive, open postures reliably makes people feel more powerful and confident. This is not a single study — it is one of the most-tested effects in this literature, supported by dozens of independent experiments and a comprehensive meta-analysis.
What the comprehensive review showed
My 2018 p-curve analysis examined 55 studies from more than 40 independent teams and found clear, strong evidential value that expansive posture increases felt power. When the full body of evidence is examined — rather than a single experiment — the effect is robust.
Embodiment, not a trick
This was never about faking confidence to fool other people. It is about using your own body to access a psychological state that is already available to you. The body and the mind are a single system; changing one changes the other.
What the headlines got wrong
The popular 'debunked' narrative conflated the robust central effect with a narrower early hormonal claim, and mistook the normal process of science — gathering more data, refining what we know — for a verdict. The most-studied and best-supported effect, that posture shapes how powerful we feel, was never the part in question.
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