Pushing easy fantasy over hard reality.

From Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 28. 

Priming isn’t the only psychological effect to have been given an audience in the millions. Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy rocketed to fame in 2012 with a TED talk advocating ‘power posing’. She recommended that just before you enter a stressful situation, such as an interview, you should find two minutes in a private place (such as a bathroom stall) to stand in an open, expansive posture: for example, with your legs apart and your hands on your hips. This powerful posture would give you a psychological – and hormonal – boost. An experiment by Cuddy and her colleagues in 2010 had found that, compared to those who were asked to sit with arms folded or slouched forward, people who were made to power-pose not only felt more powerful, but had higher risk tolerance in a betting game and had increased levels of testosterone and decreased levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

Cuddy’s message that people who used the two-minute power pose could ‘significantly change the outcomes of their life’ struck a chord: hers became the second-most-watched TED talk ever, with over 73.5 million views in total. It was followed in 2015 by Cuddy’s New York Times-bestselling self-help book, Presence, whose publisher informed us that it presented ‘enthralling science’ that could ‘liberate [us] from fear in high-pressure moments’.  Provoking quite some degree of mockery, the UK’s Conservative Party seemed to take Cuddy’s message to heart, with a spate of photos appearing that same year of their politicians adopting the wide-legged stance at various conferences and speeches.  Alas, also in 2015, when another team of scientists tried to replicate the power-posing effects, they found that while power-posers did report feeling more powerful, the study ‘failed to confirm an effect of power posing on testosterone, cortisol, and financial risk’.

You can see why all these were so popular with the systemic discrimination crowd enamored of Critical theory.  You could make a small fortune off this cognitive pollution.  It seemed to demonstrate that even though empirical discrimination was declining there was a whole other world of subtle discriminatory signaling going on.  And, perhaps most fortuitous of all, the solution did not involve the aggrieved gaining better skills, working harder or longer, or making better decisions.  No, all you had to do was invoke to posing spell.