ME/CFS Skeptic
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
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.
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:
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
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
Last edited:
