The claim that standing in an expansive posture for two minutes changes your hormones and makes you more powerful comes from one small study, and much of the original finding has not held up. In 2010, Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy, and Andy Yap published a paper in Psychological Science reporting that 42 participants who held expansive “high power” poses for one minute showed increased testosterone, decreased cortisol, and greater self-reported feelings of power and risk tolerance compared with participants who held a contractive “low power” pose. The finding, popularized in a TED talk that became one of the platform’s most viewed, was framed as evidence that body language does not just reflect how powerful you feel, it can produce the feeling and the underlying biology.
This is one study, not settled consensus, and in the years since publication, its central claims have mostly not survived closer scrutiny.
What happened when other researchers tried to replicate it
In 2015, Eva Ranehill and colleagues published a replication in Psychological Science using a considerably larger sample, 200 participants compared with the original 42. They found no measurable effect of power posing on testosterone, cortisol, or actual risk-taking behavior in a financial task. The one part of the original finding that did replicate was subjective: participants who held expansive poses reported feeling more powerful afterward, even though no hormonal or behavioral change accompanied that feeling.
The response from the original research team was notable in itself. In 2016, Dana Carney, one of the original study’s own co-authors, published a public statement saying she no longer believed the power-posing effect was real, citing concerns about the small sample size and the statistical practices used in the original 2010 paper. A subsequent replication effort has since reported a more mixed picture, finding no effect on testosterone or self-reported feelings of power, but partial support for effects on cortisol and risk-taking, which illustrates how unsettled this specific question remains rather than resolving it cleanly in either direction.
Feeling powerful and appearing powerful are different questions
The power-posing story is specifically about what a pose does to the person holding it. A separate, older body of research asks a related but distinct question: what postures and behaviors make a person appear powerful to other people watching them. Here the evidence is less dramatic but considerably more consistent.
Dana Carney, along with Judith Hall and Lavonia LeBeau, published a 2005 paper in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior examining beliefs and evidence around seventy specific nonverbal behaviors associated with social power, defined both as a personality trait and as an organizational role. The researchers found real, measurable differences across roughly half of the behaviors studied, including posture, gesture, and vocal patterns associated with higher-power roles and traits.
The study distinguished power as a stable personality trait, a general tendency toward dominance across situations, from power as a role, the rank a person actually holds within an organization at a given moment. That distinction is worth keeping in mind, because a nonverbal cue that reliably tracks with someone’s assigned rank in a workplace is not automatically the same cue that reflects a person’s underlying dominant disposition, and the paper found the two did not always overlap in the same behaviors.
Why the perception often outruns the reality
A related meta-analysis, by Judith Hall, Erik Coats, and Lavonia LeBeau, examined a wide range of nonverbal behaviors, including facial expression, eye gaze, interpersonal distance, body movement, and touch, in relation to actual and perceived social status. The result worth sitting with: people’s beliefs about which nonverbal cues signal power were stronger and more consistent than the actual differences in behavior between higher-power and lower-power people. In plain terms, most people share a fairly accurate mental model of what powerful body language looks like: more space taken up, steadier gaze, slower and less fidgety movement. But the degree to which genuinely powerful people actually display these cues, measured directly rather than assumed, was smaller and less reliable than the shared belief about it.
That gap matters for how to read advice about powerful body language. The specific cues most consistently associated with perceived power in this research, expansiveness, stillness, direct and steady eye contact, sound almost identical to the ones featured in popular power-posing advice. The difference is what they are being claimed to do. As a signal that shifts how an observer reads you in the moment, this research gives real support. As a mechanism that changes your own hormones or risk tolerance before you walk into the room, the evidence has largely not held up under closer testing.
What this actually supports
Taken together, the honest version of this research points to a narrower and more useful claim than the version that went viral. Adopting an expansive stance before a stressful moment does appear to reliably change how a person feels in the moment, according to both the original study and its replication. What it does not appear to reliably do, based on the larger replication and the original co-author’s own reassessment, is change measurable hormones or actual risk-taking behavior. Separately, and on firmer ground, decades of research into how observers read nonverbal cues suggests that expansive, stable, unhurried body language genuinely does shape how powerful a person appears to others, even though the underlying biological story about why is not the one the original 2010 study told.
What this does not prove
None of the studies discussed here followed people into real negotiations, job interviews, or long-term career outcomes to measure whether appearing powerful through posture actually changes real-world results. The nonverbal-perception research is also decades old in places, drawn largely from lab settings and coded video rather than lived professional interactions, and the specific behaviors that read as powerful may vary somewhat by culture and context in ways this research was not designed to test. The result is a finding from this specific body of work, not a universal rule about every person in every room: body language shapes how you are perceived with real consistency, but the idea that it also rewires your own physiology before you arrive is a claim that mostly did not survive its own replication.