Power Poses May Do More Harm Than Good

Standing in a ‘powerful’ position – with a broad posture, hands on hips, shoulders high and pushed back – does not make you feel psychologically and physiologically stronger and could potentially backfire, a new study has found. The idea that standing in power poses helps is intuitively appealing, especially for people without much confidence. The problem is that it is simply not true, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in the US said. They attempted to replicate the power pose study that appeared in 2010 in the journal Psychological Science. It reported increases in feelings of power, risk taking and testosterone and a decrease in cortisol. The Penn researchers found no support for any of the original effects, what is called embodied cognition. They did find that if anything – and they’re skeptical of these results, because they’d want to replicate them – that,

if you’re a loser and you take a winner or high power pose, your testosterone decreases.