Monday, April 6, 2015

Power Posing as (but) feelings of confidence?

Clipart:
Clker.com
There was a well-publicized study and TED talk in 2010 by Cuddy of Harvard School of Business that demonstrated that "power posing" (striking and briefly holding a confident pose) actually made you feel more confident and showed up in changed action and blood chemistry. Those findings certainly resonated with our consistent observations as to the impact of embodied, haptic pronunciation teaching.

But now comes a new study by Ranehill and colleagues at the University of Zurich, calling into question the early research, (summarized by Science Daily.com -- see full citation below) that comes to this conclusion:
"This indicates that the main influence of power poses is the fact that subjects realize that the [sic] feel more self-confident. We find no proof, however, that this has any effect on their behavior or their physiology." (Emphasis, mine!) Feelings of confidence but no observable other effects? Really?

On the face of it, the new study does seem a fair replication, except possibly for this: subjects in the first study were students in the Harvard School of Business; subjects in the second: " . . . 102 men and 98 women, most of them students from Zurich . . . " (Emphasis, mine.)

Need I pose the question?

Probably not!

Full citation:
University of Zurich. (2015, April 1). Poses of power are less powerful than we thought. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 6, 2015 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150401084325.htm

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