Kimberly White/Getty Images for theNew York Times

The first big reveal in this week's New York Times Magazine feature, "When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy," is that the superstar of social psychology and inventor of the "power pose" has been reduced to hunching. She's sitting in her Harvard office with one hand tucked beneath her leg, writes reporter Susan Dominus, like "someone in a conflicted emotional state, someone both wanting to tell her story and unsure about doing so."

Daniel Engber Daniel Engber is a columnist for Slate.


Cuddy rose to prominence on the basis of a 2010 study in which she and two colleagues claimed to show that if a person spends even two minutes in a "high-power pose," with her arms outstretched, she will "embody power and instantly become more powerful." (In practice, that meant they felt more powerful, had higher levels of testosterone and lower levels of cortisol, and took more risks in a gambling task.) In her enormously successful TED talk on this research—one that spawned a best-selling book—Cuddy described power posing as a "free, no-tech life hack" that "can significantly change the outcomes of [your] life."

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As Cuddy made the rounds in the media, collecting public accolades for her game-changing science, a fight was brewing in her field. By the end of 2011, a movement had emerged among psychologists to re-examine prior work. Statistics-minded critics pointed out that standard ways of setting up experiments and analyzing the results had some major flaws, and that the research literature seemed all but guaranteed to be infected with a rash of false-positive conclusions. Cuddy's work, like that of many other scientists, would fail to replicate in larger studies. It seemed that she and her co-authors had cajoled the data in the usual ways, by excluding certain information when it seemed useful or convenient—a process known as p-hacking.

Cuddy "emerged from this upheaval as a unique object of social psychology's new, enthusiastic spirit of self-flagellation," writes Dominus, "as if only in punishing one of its most public stars could it fully break from its past." Indeed, her fellow academics attacked more than her research, Dominus says, "but also her career, her income, her ambition, even her intelligence, sometimes with evident malice." In the end, she became the "poster girl" for problems in psychology, if not the hunching emblem of its human cost.

Dominus' story should be read in its entirety, as a portrait of the replication crisis and the tensions it evokes. For all its extraordinary and empathetic detail, though, I think it leaves several vital questions unexplored. First and foremost: Why did Cuddy end up as the "poster girl" for suspect science, and how much did it matter that she was a woman?

The power pose was meant to give women greater confidence, so the gender gap would go away.

The Times only gestures at the role of gender in the story: "The public nature of the attacks against Cuddy have reverberated among social psychologists, raising questions about the effects of harsh discourse on the field and particularly on women," writes Dominus near the end of her account. She goes on to cite the claim of one social psychologist, Alison Ledgerwood, "that if scientists keep having hostile conversations on social media, women are more likely to be driven away from the field."

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Yet there's clearly a lot more to the gender subtext here, beyond the well-established, asymmetric risk of online bullying. In her narrative of Cuddy's shaming, Dominus lays out a Mars-and-Venus set of characters. On one side are the women: Cuddy, a former ballerina, who made her way through grad school with a newborn baby; her mentor Susan Fiske, whom Cuddy has described as the "angel adviser" who believed in her and nurtured her career; and Cuddy's colleague and co-author Dana Carney, with whom she devised the pioneering work on power poses. On the other side are men: Cuddy's former grad school classmate, Joseph Simmons, a psychology-and-softball bro who joined with Uri Simonsohn and Leif Nelson to lead the charge for greater rigor in psychology, and who go after Cuddy's research on their blog Data Colada; and Andrew Gelman, a Columbia University statistician, political scientist, and occasional Slate contributor who has written at length, repeatedly, about the flaws in Cuddy's work (if not her character), and her unwillingness to acknowledge her mistakes.

Dominus doesn't say these men are monsters—it's clear they're not—but she does take the skeptic side to task. At one point, she has Simmons reread an email he sent to Cuddy