Amy Cuddy

Amy Cuddy
Amy J. C. Cuddy. Photo by Evgenia Eliseeva
Born	(1972-07-27) July 27, 1972 Robesonia, Pennsylvania
Nationality	American
Institutions	Rutgers University Kellogg School of Management Harvard Business School
Alma mater	University of Colorado Princeton University
Thesis	The bias map: behavior from intergroup affect and stereotypes (2005)
Doctoral advisor	Susan Fiske
Website people.hbs.edu/acuddy

Amy Joy Casselberry Cuddy (born July 27, 1972) is an American social psychologist, author and lecturer known for her research on stereotyping and discrimination, emotions, power, nonverbal behavior, and the effects of social stimuli on hormone levels.

Cuddy is an Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit.^[1] Her TED talk, delivered at TEDGlobal 2012 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and posted in October 2012, has been viewed more than 27 million times and ranks second among the most-viewed TED talks.^[2][3]

Cuddy has studied the origins and outcomes of how people judge and influence each other. She has done experimental and correlational research on stereotyping and discrimination (e.g., against Asian Americans, elderly people, Latinos, working mothers), the causes and consequences of feeling ambivalent emotions (e.g., envy and pity), nonverbal behavior and communication, and hormonal responses to social stimuli.

In December 2015 Cuddy published the book, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges.

As a lecturer Cuddy has spoken about the psychology of power, influence, nonverbal communication, and prejudice.^[4][5][6]

Career

Cuddy graduated from Conrad Weiser High School.

Cuddy holds a PhD in Social Psychology from Princeton University, an MA in Social Psychology from Princeton University and a BA in Social Psychology from the University of Colorado.

Prior to joining Harvard Business School, Cuddy was an Assistant Professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University,^[7] where she taught leadership in organizations in the MBA program and research methods in the doctoral program; and an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University, where she taught undergraduate social psychology. At Harvard Business School, she has taught MBA courses on negotiation, and power and influence, as well as executive education courses.

Research

Along with Susan Fiske and Peter Glick (Lawrence University), Cuddy developed the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) ^[8] and the Behaviors from Intergroup Affect and Stereotypes (BIAS) Map. ^[9] These are used to 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. ^[10]

Power posing

Cuddy carried out an experiment with Dana Carney and Andy Yap^[11] (UC-Berkeley) on how nonverbal expressions of power (i.e., expansive, open, space-occupying postures)^[12] affect people’s feelings, behaviors, and hormone levels. ^[13] 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.^[14][15][16] David Brooks summarized the findings, “If you act powerfully, you will begin to think powerfully.”^[17]

This and related research has been published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Psychological Science, Research in Organizational Behavior, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, and Science.

Replication efforts

In 2014, Eva Ranehill and other researchers tried to replicate this experiment with a larger group of participants and a double-blind setup.^[18] Ranehill et al. 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.^[19]

Carney, Cuddy, & Yap responded in the same issue of Psychological Science,^[20] with an overview of 33 published studies related to power posing, including the Ranehill et al. study. Almost all had reported significant effects of some kind. The overview noted methodological differences between their 2010 study^[11] and the Ranehill replication, which may have moderated the effects of posing.^[21]

Two statistics researchers at the Wharton School, Simmons & Simonsohn, later shared a meta-analysis of the same 33 studies on their statistics blog.^[22] Based on the distribution of p-values reported across the studies (the 'p-curve'), they concluded that studies so far have demonstrated little to no average effect of power posing.^[23]

Publications

In December 2015 Cuddy published the book, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges, which built on the value of the outward practice of power posing to focus on projecting one's authentic self with the inward-focused concept of presence—defined as “believing in and trusting yourself – your real honest feelings, values and abilities.”^[24] The book reached at least as high as #3 on The New York Times Best Seller list (Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous).^[25]

Cuddy also wrote a book, translated into the German language, Dein Körper spricht für dich: Von innen wirken, überzeugen, ausstrahlen (Your body speaks for you: From the inside, work, convince, radiate).^[26]

Awards and honors

• World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, 2014^[27]
• TEDGlobal Speaker, 2012^[28]
• TIME magazine ‘Game Changer’, 2012^[29]
• PopTech Annual Conference, 'Talk of the Day' October 21, 2011^[30]
• Rising Star Award, Association for Psychological Science (APS), 2011^[31]
• Psychology Today, The Top 10 Psychology Studies of 2010 (Carney, Cuddy, & Yap, 2010)
• Cover story, Harvard Magazine, Nov-Dec, 2010
• The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2009, Harvard Business Review^[32]
• Michele Alexander Early Career Award, Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues
• Distinguished Alumni Award, Conrad Weiser High School, Robesonia, PA

Personal life

Cuddy grew up in a very small Pennsylvania Dutch town, Robesonia, Pennsylvania. She is a classically trained ballet dancer and worked as a roller-skating waitress when she was an undergraduate at the University of Colorado at Boulder. When she was a sophomore in college she sustained a serious head injury in a car accident.^{[33][34][35][36]} Her doctors told her she was not likely to fully recover and should anticipate significant challenges finishing her undergraduate degree. Her IQ fell temporarily by two standard deviations,^[37][38] which is about 30 points in IQ test.^[39] She eventually completed her undergraduate studies and went on to earn a PhD at Princeton. Cuddy has often tweeted of her love for live music, and spent a number of seasons following the Grateful Dead. She has one son. In August 2014, in Aspen, Colorado, she married Paul Coster.

References

External links

• Cuddy, A. J. C., Glick, P., & Beninger, A. (2011). The dynamics of warmth and competence judgments, and their outcomes in organizations. Research in Organizational Behavior, 31, 73-98.
• Carney, D., Cuddy, A. J. C., & Yap, A. (2010). Power posing: Brief nonverbal displays affect neuroendocrine levels and risk tolerance. Psychological Science, 21, 1363-1368
• Cuddy, A. J. C., Fiske, S. T., & Glick, P. (2008). Warmth and competence as universal dimensions of social perception: The Stereotype Content Model and the BIAS Map. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (vol. 40, pp. 61–149). New York, NY: Academic Press.
• Cuddy, A. J. C., Fiske, S. T., & Glick, P. (2007). The BIAS Map: Behaviors from intergroup affect and stereotypes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 631-648.
• Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J. C., & Glick, P. (2007). Universal dimensions of social cognition: Warmth, then competence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 77-83.
• Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J. C., Glick, P., & Xu, J. (2002). A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 878-902

Media:

• Amy Cuddy at TED
  • TED Talk: Amy Cuddy: "Your body language shapes who you are" (TED Global, June 2012), about the effect of peoples' body language on their perception of how powerful they themselves are. (same video on YouTube)
• Cuddy is interviewed by Anderson Cooper, host of AC360 about body language and the 2012 United States Presidential Debate between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.