The advice on how to make people take you seriously tends to arrive with great confidence and very little evidence. Two claims dominate the genre: adopt a dominant posture, and project authority. As it happens, psychology has an unusually clear verdict on both, and it is a humbling one. One of the tactics does not work at all, and one of the things that genuinely does work is uncomfortably shallow. Knowing both is useful, because the first spares you some wasted effort and the second is a bias you can learn to use and, just as importantly, to distrust.
The pose that did not hold up
Start with the most famous piece of advice in the category. In 2010, Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy and Andy Yap published a paper in Psychological Science reporting that holding an expansive, powerful posture for two minutes raised people’s feelings of power, increased testosterone, lowered the stress hormone cortisol, and made them more willing to take risks. A 2012 TED talk turned it into a global phenomenon, and the advice to strike a power pose before a big meeting became conventional wisdom.
Then people tried to reproduce it. In 2015, Eva Ranehill and colleagues ran a much larger and more tightly controlled replication. The self-reported feeling of power survived, but the hormonal and behavioral effects, the parts that would actually change your standing, did not appear. Most striking of all, the original lead author walked away from her own finding. Dana Carney posted a statement disavowing the work, writing plainly that she no longer believed power-pose effects were real. The single most-shared trick for commanding respect with your body turns out, on the best evidence, to be at most a mild and private mood lift, and at worst a case study in how fast a catchy result travels before anyone checks it. Posing in the mirror will not change how the room treats you.
The shallow thing that does work
If posture is overrated, one of the real drivers is almost embarrassingly basic. In a 2020 paper in The Leadership Quarterly, Neil MacLaren, Francis Yammarino and colleagues tested what is known as the babble hypothesis: the idea that people who simply talk more get seen as leaders. Across their data, the amount of time a person spent speaking predicted who emerged as a leader better than their intelligence, their agreeableness, or their actual skill at the task. The quality of what people said had no significant effect on the impression they made. It was the quantity of talking, not the content, that moved the needle, though a couple of physical cues such as vocal pitch and eye contact mattered too.
This is not a flattering finding about human judgment, but it is a clarifying one. A great deal of being taken seriously comes down to visible participation, to occupying airtime, quite independently of whether what you are saying is any good. The person who emerges from a meeting looking like the authority is very often just the one who spoke the most.
How to use this without being fooled by it
Put the two findings together and you get a practical, slightly cynical map. Being taken seriously owes far less to theatrical body language, which mostly does not work, than to plain participation, which does, even when it should not. That cuts in two directions at once. If you have good ideas and stay quiet, you will be underrated regardless of your merit, so the genuinely useful move is unglamorous: speak up, claim your share of the airtime, put your thinking into the room rather than keeping it politely to yourself. Silence is not read as depth; it is read as absence.
But the same finding is a warning aimed back at you. If talking time inflates perceived competence, then the most talkative person in any meeting is not reliably the one most worth listening to, and that includes you on the days you are the one talking most. Understanding the bias lets you do two things at once: take the airtime your ideas deserve, and quietly discount the bias when you are the audience, weighing what was said rather than how much of it there was.
What the evidence does and does not settle
A few honest limits belong here. The felt-confidence part of power posing has some modest support, and Cuddy has continued to argue that posture can influence how people feel, so the practice is not worthless as a private ritual, only as a way to change how others treat you. The babble research comes largely from small-group and laboratory settings and concerns leader emergence, who looks like a leader, rather than leader effectiveness, who actually is one, and talking a great deal carries obvious social costs when it tips into dominating others. These are averages and tendencies, shaped by culture and context, not rules for any given room.
Within those limits, the takeaway is clearer and more honest than the usual script. Make people take you seriously less by striking poses, which the science has quietly abandoned, and more by contributing visibly, which it supports even as it exposes why the effect is somewhat unfair. And keep enough humility to remember the flip side, that the person talking most, sometimes you, is not automatically the one who is right. The slower and sturdier route remains doing work worth taking seriously and then making sure it is actually heard, rather than performing seriousness with your shoulders.