Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Power Poses: Are They Ultimately Good or Bad?

Reporter: Robert Frederick
The nervousness most people get a few minutes before, say, a job interview can be squashed—at least a little bit—by standing like a superhero. Scientists already know that striking such power poses causes your body’s testosterone levels to go up—so you feel more powerful—and your cortisol levels to go down—so you feel less stressed. Overall, that makes you feel more confident. But what scientists don’t yet know about getting confidence from power poses, says cognitive psychologist Eric Stone of Wake Forest University…

Interviewee: Eric Stone
Is confidence good or bad when that confidence is not justified by actual knowledge? And if it depends, what does it depend on?

Reporter: Robert Frederick
Indeed, suppose the job you’re interviewing for is beyond what you actually know how to do. But, you apply anyway because it comes with a great salary and benefits. You strike the power pose for a few minutes before the interview and your resulting confidence—even though it’s misplaced—gets you the job. Is that good or bad?

Interviewee: Eric Stone
And it’s been sort of assumed that overconfidence is bad. It’s been described as “one of the seven deadly sins.” I mean how horrible is that! We’re just all egotistical, sort of stuck-up people. But then at the same time, there is some academic work and a lot of work in the media and sort of a common layperson belief that it’s good to be confident. Right? That people who are confident may get better jobs—lots of good things happen to them.

Reporter: Robert Frederick
That’s what social psychologist and Harvard Business School’s Amy Cuddy found out as well.

TED Talk: Amy Cuddy
And there’s a lot of reason to believe that this is a valid way to look at this.

Reporter: Robert Frederick
That’s Cuddy speaking in her 2012 TED Talk about power poses and why they work.

TED Talk: Amy Cuddy
So social scientists have spent a lot of time looking at the effects of our body language or other people’s body language on judgements. And we make sweeping judgements and inferences from body language. And those judgements can predict really meaningful life outcomes, like who we hire or promote, who we ask out on a date.

Reporter: Robert Frederick
But not what happens after that. Indeed, you might get that great job you interviewed for—that’s good—but later you’re fired for incompetence because your confidence was misplaced and you didn’t actually know how to do the job. That’s bad. It’s the risk you take, of course, and if you don’t take risks, Stone says…

Interviewee: Eric Stone
If you don’t take risks, good things won’t happen to you. So it may well be that the impact of confidence is to increase risk-taking. But the impact of risk-taking—whether that’s good or bad—depends on the actual situation that we’re talking about.

Reporter: Robert Frederick
To date, scientists have only studied a very few actual situations, so they don’t really know in which situations it may be good or bad to have such unjustified confidence. Part of the reason for that, Stone says, is that the field is still pretty new—so there just haven’t been a lot of studies yet of various situations. But part of the reason is because psychologists have been using two different analytical methods to analyze their data. It turns out if you use both of them, sometimes they lead to two different conclusions. That’s what happened to Eric Stone and his team.

Interviewee: Eric Stone
We were having trouble wrapping our heads around it, and this is why the field—including us—had made some mistakes. We’re not all just stupid. It really is fairly tricky. This led us to basically ask, “Well, what’s different about these two methods when they both seem intuitively correct?”

Reporter: Robert Frederick
Once they figured that out, Stone says, their work did call into question the conclusions of some past research. But that kind of thing is pretty normal for science. So, rather than righting past wrongs, Stone says he’s focused on making sure the field has the right analytical approaches going forward.

Interviewee: Eric Stone
Because this is such a new field, we want to make sure that the field gets off really on the right track in starting to answer these questions for real. And again, these questions are: is it good or bad to have misplaced confidence?

Reporter: Robert Frederick
And so begin to answer those questions for real for everyone, including for people who use power poses to gain confidence that’s beyond their actual knowledge or abilities — who make themselves into power posers. I’m Robert Frederick.