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For a while in the early-to-mid 2010s, the most prominent psychology research in the world was on power posing. Harvard’s Amy Cuddy did a TED talk that reached tens of millions; her exhortation to “fake it til you make it” struck a chord and produced endless book sales from readers fascinated to hear how, just by adopting an expansive posture, you could revolutionise your own psychology and succeed at life.

In this episode, with the benefit of hindsight, we ask: what was that all about?

This podcast is sponsored by Works in Progress magazine. In today’s episode we mentioned “The Perks of Being a Mole Rat”, Aria Shrecker’s entertaining new piece on what makes some animals live for an inordinately long time. Find it and endless other fascinating pieces on human progress at worksinprogress.co.

Show notes

* Dana Carney (not Carvey)’s 2016 letter on changing her mind about power posing

* The 1996 study about walking more slowly down the hallway after reading words to do with old people

* Tom’s first and second pieces in Nature

* Daryl Bem’s piece on “Writing the Empirical Journal Article”

* Amy Cuddy’s TED talk (the third most-watched ever)

* Two studies we mentioned on the facial feedback hypothesis

* 2014 NYT article on power posing and Amy Cuddy

* Amy Cuddy’s bestselling book, Presence

* UK Conservative Party politicians power posing for some reason

* The original 2010 power posing paper in Psychological Science

* A re-examination of the robustness of the results

* Ranehill et al.’s 2015 replication attempt

* Cuddy et al.’s “summary and review” from the same issue

* Simmons & Simonsohn on the whole evidence base on power posing

* Cuddy’s strategic retreat

* Meta-analysis on expansive vs. “lack of contractive” posing

Credits

The Science Fictions podcast is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com/subscribe