The power pose is one of the more bizarre trends to have caught on in recent years.  There was a time when you would scarcely see a politician talking in public without their legs akimbo and their chest jutting out.  Alas, a new study from Iowa State University suggests the merits of the power pose are rather flimsy.

The trend for power posing began in 2010 after a study suggested that adopting an expansive physical posture increased testosterone and reduced cortisone levels in the body, which made people feel more powerful and inclined to take risks.  Unfortunately, it’s not a claim that has a great deal of evidence behind it, and the initial study was widely criticized for it’s lack of replicability, and a 2018 follow up by the team did little to placate critics.

The Iowa State team have conducted a meta-analysis of every study on power posing, and identified a significant flaw in the theory.  It emerged that the majority of studies only compared power poses to contractive poses, such as slouching, rather than to a more normal posture, and this lack of comparison to natural posture will inevitably skew the results.

Easily led

It’s a situation that has prompted a degree of despair from the researchers, not only that such poor study design can have been conducted by so many researchers, but that so many people have been taken in by the concept.  A TED Talk on power poses has been seen over 70 million times and a book on the topic became a New York Times bestseller.

“There has literally never been a study that compared a power pose to a normal pose and found any positive effect for a power pose,” the researchers say. “I find this pretty stunning because of the multimillion-dollar industry that has been built up around power posing. It is not dissimilar to a drug being sold to the public without a single study ever having been able to show that the drug works better than placebo or doing nothing.”

Of the 40 or so studies published on power poses, just four compared neutral stances with poor and ‘powerful’ poses.  One of these clearly showed that a neutral stance was most effective,

“The only conclusion researchers should draw from the existing literature on postural feedback is that contractive poses such as slouching should be avoided, which is hardly novel,” the researchers conclude. “I recall my elementary school teachers yelling at us about slouching and not what has been sold here.”