Amy Cuddy
American psychologist (born 1972)
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Through Psychology
Early life and education
Cuddy grew up in Robesonia, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Conrad Weiser High School in 1990.
In 1998, Cuddy earned a Bachelor of Arts in psychology, graduating magna cum laude from the University of Colorado Boulder. She experienced a traumatic brain injury during college. She attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1998 to 2000 before transferring to Princeton University to follow her adviser, Susan Fiske. She received a Master of Arts in 2003 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 2005 in social psychology (dissertation: "The BIAS Map: Behavior from intergroup affect and stereotypes") from Princeton University.
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Academic career
From 2005 to 2006, Cuddy was an assistant professor of psychology at Rutgers University. From 2006 to 2008, she was an assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where she taught leadership in organizations in the MBA program and research methods in the doctoral program. From 2008 to 2017, she was an assistant professor and then associate professor in the Negotiation, Organizations and Markets Unit at the Harvard Business School, where she taught courses in negotiations, leadership, power and influence, and research methods. In the spring of 2017, The New York Times reported, "she quietly left her tenure-track job at Harvard", where she lectured in the psychology department.
Research
Stereotypes
In 2002, Cuddy co-authored the proposal of the stereotype content model, with Susan Fiske and Peter Glick (Lawrence University). In 2007, the same authors proposed the "Behaviors from Intergroup Affect and Stereotypes" (BIAS) Map model. These models propose to explain how individuals make judgments of other people and groups within two core trait dimensions, warmth and competence, and to discern how these judgments shape and motivate our social emotions, intentions, and behaviors.
Power posing
In 2010, Cuddy, Dana Carney and Andy Yap published the results of an experiment on how nonverbal expressions of power (such as expansive, open, space-occupying postures) affect people's feelings, behaviors, and hormone levels. In particular, they claimed that adopting body postures associated with dominance and power ("power posing") for as little as two minutes can increase testosterone, decrease cortisol, increase appetite for risk, and cause better performance in job interviews. This was widely reported in popular media. David Brooks summarized the findings, "If you act powerfully, you will begin to think powerfully."
Other researchers tried to replicate this experiment with a larger group of participants and a double-blind setup. The experimenters found that power posing increased subjective feelings of power, but did not affect hormones or actual risk tolerance. They published their results in Psychological Science. Though Cuddy and others are continuing to carry out research into power posing, Carney has disavowed the original results. The theory is often cited as an example of the replication crisis in psychology, in which initially seductive theories cannot be replicated in follow-up experiments.