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. Earlier this year at the conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, there was a presentation of a 2016 survey of 700 social psychologists, assessing their perceptions of the influence of social media on their careers. The subsequent conversation on popular Facebook groups was so combative that Alison Ledgerwood, a social psychologist at the University of California, Davis, felt the need to respond in a blog post. In it, she argued that if scientists keep having hostile conversations on social media, women are more likely to be driven away from the field. (Women in the profession, the survey presented at the conference reported, participated less than their male colleagues in social-media discussions.)

Even people who believe that the methodological reforms are essential say its costs to science are real. “It’s become like politics — we’ve created two camps of people who shouldn’t be in two camps in the first place,” says Jay Van Bavel, the social psychologist at N.Y.U. “It’s perceived slights and defensiveness, and everybody has some history or grievance — and it will never end because there is that history of perceived grievances, of one of your colleagues who has been put through it, or criticized your friend in a public forum. It’s terrible for science. It’s not good.”

If Amy Cuddy is a victim, she may not seem an obvious one: She has real power, a best-selling book, a thriving speaking career. She did not own up fully to problems in her research or try to replicate her own study. (She says there were real hurdles to doing so, not least of which was finding a collaborator to take that on.) But many of her peers told me that she did not deserve the level of widespread and sometimes vicious criticism she has endured. “Amy has been the target of mockery and meanness on Facebook, on Twitter, in blog posts — I feel like, Wow, I have never seen that in science,” Van Bavel says. “I’ve only been in it for 15 years, but I’ve never seen public humiliation like that.”

As a result, the breadth of the accusations — how diffuse they are — could easily be mistaken for the depth of her scientific missteps, which at the outset were no different from those of so many of her peers. “We were all being trained to simplify, to get our message out there — there were conferences and panels on how to do it,” says Richard Petty, a social psychologist at Ohio State. “One of the ironies is that Amy just did it more successfully.”

I was surprised to find that some of the leaders in the replication movement were not Cuddy’s harshest critics but spoke of her right to defend her work in more measured tones. “Why does everyone care so much about what Amy says?” Brian Nosek says. “Science isn’t about consensus.” Cuddy was entitled to her position; the evidence in favor or against power posing would speak for itself. Leif Nelson, one of the three pioneers of the movement, says Cuddy is no different from most other scientists in her loyalty to her data. “Authors love their findings,” he says. “And you can defend almost anything — that’s the norm of science, not just in psychology.” He still considers Cuddy a “very serious psychologist”; he also believes the 2010 paper “is a bunch of nonsense.” But he says, “It does not strike me as at all notable that Amy would defend her work. Most people do.”

Every researcher has a threshold at which he or she is convinced of the evidence; in social psychology, especially, there is no such thing as absolute proof, only measures of probability. In recent months, Cuddy reached the threshold needed to alter her thinking on the effect of hormones. She mentioned, at a psychology conference where she was presenting her work, that a study had recently been conducted on power posing. “They found no hormonal effects,” she said before taking a breath. “That study is done very well, and I trust those results.” Although 11 new studies have recently been published that do not show the downstream effects of power posing on behaviors, Cuddy is still fighting for power posing. The research, she says, still shows its effect on feelings of power: At the conference, she presented a comprehensive meta-analysis, a version of which, she says, she will soon publish, with a strong P-curve supporting that, and she also presented a P-curve suggesting that power posing had a robust effect on self-evaluations, emotions and moods.

Cuddy now seems ready to move on to a new phase. We met near her home in Newton, Mass., in August. Cuddy, smiling, fresh from physical therapy for a torn ACL, was in a tennis skirt, looking young and more lighthearted than I had ever seen her. She had abandoned the dream of tenure. She was planning a new project, a new book, she told me. It was coming together in her mind: “Bullies, Bystanders and Bravehearts.” It would be personal; there would be research; she would write, and she would talk, and she would interview people who had suffered fates worse than her own and bounced back. She would tell their stories and hers, and because she is a good talker, people would listen.