How Relevant are Incidental Power Poses for HCI?

People

• Yvonne Jansen, Sorbonne Université, CNRS
• Kasper Hornbæk, University of Copenhagen

The paper

Abstract

The concept of power pose originates from a Psychology study from 2010 which suggested that holding an expansive pose can change hormone levels and increase risk-taking behavior. Follow-up experiments suggested that expansive poses incidentally imposed by the design of an environment lead to more dishonest behaviors. While multiple replication attempts of the 2010 study failed, the follow-up experiments on incidental postures have so far not been replicated. As UI design in HCI can incidentally lead to expansive body postures, we attempted two conceptual replications: we first asked 44 participants to tap areas on a wall-sized display and measured their self-reported sense of power; we then asked 80 participants to play a game on a large touch-screen and measured risk-taking. Based on Bayesian analyses we find that incidental power poses had little to no effect on our measures but could cause physical discomfort. We conclude by discussing our findings in the context of theory-driven research in HCI.

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Context

Photo taken by Erik (HASH) Hersman from Orlando - Power pose by Amy Cuddy at PopTech 2011, CC BY 2.0.

However, incidental body postures may only be leveraged in HCI if they can be reliably elicited. In 2015, a large-scale replication project (OSC 2015) re-opened the files on 100 published experiments and found that a considerable number of reported effects did not replicate, leading to the so-called "replication crisis" in Psychology. Neither the study by Carney et al. (Carney2010) nor the one by Yap et al. (Yap2013) was among the replicated studies, but multiple high powered and pre-registered studies have since then failed to establish a link between power poses and various behavioral measures (Ranehill 2015, Garrison 2016, Keller 2017, Ronay 2017, Bailey 2017, Bombari 2017, Jackson 2017, Latu 2017, Klaschinski 2017). While a Bayesian meta-analysis of six pre-registered studies (Gronau 2017) provides credible evidence for a small effect of power poses on self-reported felt power (Cohen d ≈ 0.2), the practical relevance of this small effect remains unclear (Jonas 2017).

Examples of incidental postures used in experiments by Yap et al.

• We operationalize power poses as incidental body postures which can be brought about by interface and interaction design.
• We measure in a first experiment effects on self-reported felt power. Our results on their own are inconclusive as our data are consistent with a wide range of possible effect sizes, including zero.
• In a second experiment we measure behavioral effects on risk-taking behavior while playing a computer game. Results indicate that the manipulation of incidental body posture does not predict willingness to take risks.

References

A short (and incomplete) history of power pose research

1. 2010 Carney, Cuddy, and Yap publish Power posing: brief nonverbal displays affect neuroendocrine levels and risk tolerance
2. 2013 Yap, Wazlawek, Lucas, Cuddy, and Carney publish The Ergonomics of Dishonesty: The Effect of Incidental Posture on Stealing, Cheating, and Traffic Violations
3. 2015 Ranehill, Dreber, Johannesson, Leiberg, Sul, and Weber publish the first failed replication attempt of Carney 2010 titled Assessing the Robustness of Power Posing: No Effect on Hormones and Risk Tolerance in a Large Sample of Men and Women
4. 2015 Carney, Cuddy, Yap publish a response to Ranehill et al. titled Review and Summary of Research on the Embodied Effects of Expansive (vs. Contractive) Nonverbal Displays where they collect 33 studies on power posing and analyze the differences between successful and unsuccessful studies. The main take-away is that they suggest that replication failures must be due to moderator variables and that the next step should be to identify relevant moderators.
5. 2016 A heated online discussion emerges after a Slat article written by Gelman and Fung titled The Power of the “Power Pose” – Amy Cuddy’s famous finding is the latest example of scientific overreach.
6. Sep 2016 Dana Carney, first author of Carney et al. 2010 publishes a statement on her personal website where she expresses her updated belief that power poses are not real.

Replication Material

Highly cited

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