The poses were the same as in the original study but were held for three minutes instead of the original one minute. As with all research, replication was needed to check the validity of the results. Participants who had taken powerful poses reported feeling more powerful, but there was no trace of this feeling in the behavioral tasks. There was also the fact that the “filler” task used during the poses involved faces in the original study but words in the replication. Below is an image showing the different types of power poses. They provided a second saliva sample, allowing the researchers to compare their hormone levels before and after the power stances. It's kind of hard to say you don't have time for it. Doing this for just two minutes will raise your testosterone and increase your confidence, while also decreasing your cortisol and improving your ability to handle stress. What’s tricky here is that although this was a close replication of the original study, there were differences that could have been important.
– A popular and inspiring 2012 TED Talk extolled the benefits of "power posing": That is, stretching your body into what researchers called "open, expansive postures" associated with dominance in order to feel more powerful. It's an encouraging idea, as the researchers put it, "that a person can, by assuming two simple one-minute poses, embody power and instantly become more powerful." (See some of the poses here.) But new findings are casting doubt on the original US study, Ars Technica reports. A University of Zurich researcher led an effort to replicate the findings, but it didn't work out the same way. Both studies involved participants giving saliva samples and engaging in various poses, either "open" or more closed-in. But the new study involved 200 participants, compared to the original study's 42. And in the new study, participants got their instructions through a computer rather than a person, thus theoretically preventing the possibility that an experimenter was creating some kind of bias with her instructions. After performing their poses, subjects participated in games along the lines of gambling, which involved deciding what level of risk to take or how competitive to be. While the subjects who'd performed power poses said they felt more powerful, they didn't actually behave differently in the games, Ars Technica reports, nor did saliva samples indicate a difference in hormones between the two groups. Still, there are a number of complicating factors, including the fact that the two studies were performed in different countries. (Feeling an inspiration drought? Here are some uplifting stories to fix that.)