Amy Cuddy (born in Robesonia, Pennsylvania, in 1972) is an American social psychologist best known for promoting "power posing", a self-improvement technique whose scientific basis has been questioned. Her most cited academic work concerns the study of stereotypes.
She studied at the University of Colorado and earned her doctorate at Princeton in 2005, under the supervision of Susan Fiske. She then taught at Rutgers, at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and at Harvard Business School, where she remained until 2017.
With Fiske and Peter Glick, she proposed the stereotype content model, which explains how we judge people and groups along two dimensions: warmth and competence. In 2010, with Dana Carney and Andy Yap, she published an experiment claiming that a few minutes in expansive postures could alter hormones and behavior. Other researchers failed to reproduce the hormonal effects, and Carney has disavowed the original results.
Her influence lies both in stereotype research and in the debate over the replication crisis in psychology, where her case is often cited.
Key ideas
- Stereotype content model. We judge other people and groups along two dimensions: warmth and competence.
- BIAS Map. It links intergroup affect and stereotypes to the social emotions and behaviors they motivate.
- Power posing. The claim that adopting expansive postures changes feelings and hormones; its empirical basis is now disputed.
Curiosities
A brain injury in college
She suffered a traumatic brain injury during her studies. She then attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst before following her adviser Susan Fiske to Princeton.
A TED talk on body language
In 2012 she gave a talk at TED Global about how body language affects how we perceive our own power.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.