Greenberg's study on power posing

I thought this was interesting, thanks to Cyrus (EDIT: and Matthew Dalby) for highlighting this on Twitter. I'll try to explain briefly what this is about and why it is relevant to ME/CFS.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1433740028170154036


Power posing is the idea that taking a posture associated with being powerful, result in a feeling of being more powerful and behaving more assertively. This idea was popularized by Amy Cudy, who did Ted talks and sold books about. Her original study on power posing, however, was seriously flawed. It's generally seen as a case example of bad research and psychology in crisis.

Now apparently, some researchers have nonetheless conducted a large online study on power posing and they found that it had a small effect (cohens' d = 0.25). They randomized 1002 participants to spend 60 seconds adopting either a power pose, a contractive posture, or a neutral posture, then asked them to rate their mood on a 1-7 Likert scale.

In the discussion section, they mention that the difference may be due to response bias or a placebo effect, but in the rest of the article, they seem to happily ignore this and take their results as showing that power posing likely has a beneficial effect. For example, the authors write:

"Since power posing costs nothing and takes almost no effort, the power posing technique may be worth experimenting with to see if you notice a large enough effect to make it worth applying in your own life..."​

In my view, this is rather naïve and the study adds almost no information. Beforehand it was already clear 1) that power posing would not have a moderate to large effect and 2) that the authors would not be able to fully exclude response bias.

So the situation is very similar to trials on behavioral interventions for ME/CFS. These studies are designed in such a way that we would expect to find a small effect of which we uncertain if it's due to the intervention or response bias. The authors, however, consistently act as if their study proves the intervention is effective while response bias is only mentioned briefly as a potential limitation.

Full text available here: https://www.clearerthinking.org/pos...ts-of-power-posing-from-real-to-fake-to-small

 

In short, I think research on absurd ideas might be useful to show flaws in study designs that psychology accepts as valid.

 

@Brian Hughes

 

Are we not all immensely grateful for the research on power posing? All those politicians making complete fools of themselves.

 

That's obviously where we are all going wrong. We are either drooping with exhaustion or cringing at the latest BPS absurdity.

 

How quickly would this attitude shift if you replaced "power posing" with, say, homeopathy. Or really any alternative medicine, for that matter.

You know, at this point, I'm not even sure it would. It seemed that pseudoscience has creeped in so thoroughly that this idea may just take hold. It's basically irrefutable either way, which is the whole problem of course. If it's good for some BS, it's good for all BS. BS is a ladder.

 

I, too, thought they perhaps had incontinence problems.

 

Question for moderators: perhaps it would be good to have a subforum/topic that focuses on trial methodology so that these discussion threads are separated from the general health news?

 

Some of my students have found Amy Cuddy's powerpose TED talk very helpful. One of them gave a presentation about it once. I tried to tell them that there was no evidence for it, but they are all studying a subject where evidence doesn't matter anyway (cultural studies) so there was just an awkward silence.

If you click on the "25 most popular TED talks of all time" button, Amy Cudy's is still in 2nd postion. The following has been added to the description:

Which I expect people skim over and ignore on their way to the interesting bit. Her book is advertised on the right of the screen. People love this stuff and it sells, even when proven to be BS in certain circles. It seems someone's worked out that there's still money to be made shamelessly flogging a dead horse.

 

Is that the slightly less powerful position?

 

Excellent, thanks!

 

Interesting. I remember that James Coyne was writing about Amy Cudy for a while.

https://www.coyneoftherealm.com/201...ersation-about-amy-cuddys-power-posing-paper/