About this resource

    Type of resources
    Reading
    Education level(s)
    College / Upper Division (Undergraduates), Graduate / Professional
    Primary user(s)
    Student
    Subject area(s)
    Education, Social Science
    Language(s)
    English
    Cluster
    Replication and Meta-Research
    Last updated
    29 October 2026
    Reading

    Power Posing: Reassessing The Evidence Behind The Most Popular TED Talk

    By Joe Simmons, Uri Simonsohn

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    Level College / Upper Division (Undergraduates), Graduate / Professional · For Student · Language English

    Abstract

    A recent paper in Psych Science (.pdf) reports a failure to replicate the study that inspired a TED Talk that has been seen 25 million times. [1] The talk invited viewers to do better in life by assuming high-power poses, just like Wonder Woman’s below, but the replication found that power-posing was inconsequential. If an original finding is a false positive then its replication is likely to fail, but a failed replication need not imply that the original was a false positive. In this post we try to figure out why the replication failed.

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