....2. Do Power Poses Before Entering the Room
Mr. Roosevelt, having left the Presidency 3 1/2 years earlier and now campaigning as an independent, was giving a speech in the run-up to the 1912 Presidential election, October 14th at Milwaukee, Wisconsin when he was shot in the chest by a would-be assassin. The bullet lodged in his chest wall and Roosevelt continued with his 84 minute speech.
And from the British Psychological Society's BPS Research Digest:
Does power posing – such as standing with your hands on your hips and your feet spaced well apart – really help to improve your life?
Yes – according to Amy Cuddy, one of the pioneers of the idea, at Harvard University (famous for her massively popular TED talk on the subject and her best-selling book Presence). No – according to a critical analysis by Joseph Simmons and Uri Simonsohn at the University of Pennsylvania, published in Psychological Science in 2017. The pair’s statistical analysis of 33 previous studies of potential posture effects led them to a damning conclusion: “the existing evidence is too weak to… advocate for people to engage in power posing to better their lives.”
But now Cuddy, and colleagues, are back, with a new paper also published in Psychological Science. While Cuddy appears to be softening her claims about what power-posing can achieve, she and her colleagues argue that their new analysis shows that there is strong evidence that posture affects emotions in particular, and that power-posing is likely to have a meaningful impact on people, and should not be discounted.
The new paper involves the same type of statistical analysis (called a p-curve analysis) adopted by Simmons and Simonsohn, which uses the distribution of “p values” to estimate the likelihood of falsely positive results in a given set of studies. But whereas Simmons and Simonsohn used this technique to analyse 33 published studies that Cuddy and others had highlighted in a 2015 paper, the new analysis was performed on every single peer-reviewed study in the field that Cuddy and her colleagues could find. This literature search added 21 studies to the total. In the new analysis, the researchers also looked specifically at potential effects of posture on feelings of power, which Simmons and Simonsohn did not.
This new analysis provides clear evidence, Cuddy’s team argue, that people who adopt open, expansive, “power” poses do feel more powerful. And “feeling powerful is an intrinsically consequential, theoretically important, fundamental outcome,” they write. “We believe that even transient feelings of power can have long-lasting consequences for people’s lives.”...MORE
