Standing like Wonder Woman doesn’t get you any actual superpowers, but various members of the British government are doing it anyway. The latest politician to join the ranks of the power stance team is Sajid Javid, whose promotion to home secretary was accompanied by a photo call in which he stood with his legs so far apart he practically reinvented manspreading. His colleagues have also been pictured doing this stance, which is known in lifestyle and management coaching circles as the “power pose”. It’s known to me, however, as “a bit of nonsense”.

The power pose was popularised by a 2012 TED talk (which to date has 46m views, making it one of the most popular on the site) in which social psychologist Amy Cuddy claims standing like you’re showing off a golden codpiece (my words, not hers) could “significantly change the way your life unfolds”.

She is talking about body language: those silent signals we send accidentally, and which others claim to be able to read whether we want them to or not. It would be pretty great if there was a universality to nonverbal signals (or pretty creepy, depending on your position), because we would be able to tell if someone’s verbal signals – their words – matched with their nonverbal signals – their body language – and therefore whether they’re being honest. It’s certainly the case that many people make judgments about body language (for example, people perceive those who don’t make eye contact as shifty, while those with arms folded are seen as powerless or defensive), but it doesn’t follow that they’re right. The lack of eye contact may be the result of an eye condition like amblyopia, while the folded arms could simply be that I’m cold. (Cuddy suggests women are more likely to close our bodies up to make ourselves smaller; I would counter that differing metabolic rates in men and women might mean women are often simply colder.)

I understand the argument in Cuddy’s TED talk as broadly this: becoming aware of how others perceive your body language is the key to making yourself feel more powerful, and therefore manipulating others into believing you are powerful. So if you don’t want to come across as defensive or powerless, don’t fold your arms (regardless of how cold you are). If you want to feel and be seen as powerful, stand like you’re wearing a cape in a really flattering gale. Cuddy’s intentions came from a really good place; she observed that female students came across as less powerful, with potential real-world repercussions. But rather than challenge the gender biases and stereotypes that result in men seeing women’s body language as powerless, she chose to suggest we change our body language to mimic those with actual power (who of course are mostly men). Further, she claimed that her advice was backed up by science. Unfortunately, that turned out not to be the case.

Cuddy’s own research, a 2010 paper co-authored with Dana Carney and Andy Yap, eventually fell afoul of a replication problem. That is, other researchers trying to get the same result through their own studies failed. In 2017, 11 new studies on power posing failed to replicate the original findings that formed the basis of Cuddy’s TED talk. Her paper had itself been subject to heavy scrutiny, with criticisms of it including too small a sample size (the study had 42 participants), the lack of “blinding” (wherein the researchers could allow their own biases to creep into the study), and the subjective nature of the participants’ feedback (also known as “self-reporting”, or “sometimes people lie or are mistaken”). There was also a lot of controversy about the paper’s “p-curve”, which I won’t go into here as it’s explained thoroughly in this 2017 New York Times piece. Cuddy recently came back with her own new p-curve analysis, but that doesn’t fix the other issues with the original study and certainly doesn’t prove Cuddy’s TED talk claim that power poses could “significantly change the way your life unfolds”. The original paper’s co-author Dana Carney even went as far as retracting her support for the concept of power poses and publicly discouraged others from studying them.

And yet the myth of power poses remains, as we saw this week from Sajid Javid. I attribute this partly to TED not removing the talk from their website, and partly to the general principle that you can’t put the lid back on the can once the worms are everywhere. I don’t know why government advisers don’t know that social media roundly mocks this particular stance (unless they are deliberately trolling their employers, which seems unlikely), but you don’t actually need to debunk Cuddy’s power pose research to know politicians don’t get perceived as confident, powerful entities simply by standing with their legs splayed.