I Think I Am, Therefore I Am
“Man is what he believes.” – Anton Chekhov
On the expansive, straightened shoulders of Amy Cuddy’s now-infamous “power poses,” a wave of interest has swept through behavioral science – and indeed, popular culture – around the notion that one can “fake it until you make it” [1]. Headlines boast the saying, offering strategies for success, and human resources managers inculcate the ideal in new hires with Cuddy’s TED talk, the second most popular in series history.
The concept is quite simple: act how you want others to perceive you and, over time, you will come to see yourself that way. Easy to understand and exceedingly optimistic, the fake it approach is at best a homespun panacea for self-doubt, and at worst a clever placebo, winking at a deeper truth.
A number of similar findings bolster the influence of self-perception on one’s achievements.
References
[1] The Cuddy et al. study is the subject of much contention after replication attempts have failed. Data Colada offers a good summary of both the original research and the replications (link). A link to the original study is here.
[2] Adam, Hajo, and Adam D. Galinsky. “Enclothed cognition.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48, no. 4 (2012): 918-925.
[3] A third condition did not have participants wear the coat at all, but simply left an exposed “doctor’s coat” in the room and asked participants to write about how they identified with it – in the graph, this group is labeled as “identifying with a doctor’s coat.”
[4] Steele, Claude M. “A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance.” American psychologist 52, no. 6 (1997): 613.
[5] The participants “were both good at math and strongly identified with it in the sense of seeing themselves as strong math students and seeing math as important to their self-definition.”
[6] Roberson, L., & Kulik, C. T. (2007). Stereotype threat at work. The Academy of Management Perspectives, 21(2), 24–40. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMP.2007.25356510
About the Author
Andrew Lewis
Andrew is a writer and behavioral scientist focused on belief construction and how people evaluate new information. He is a PhD candidate in Politics at the University of Oxford, and a doctoral researcher at its Centre for Experimental Social Science (CESS). He was previously at Carnegie Mellon University where he worked at the BEDR Policy Lab and Center for Behavioral and Decision Research (CBDR), and was a research and teaching assistant to George Loewenstein.
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