I’ve written a lot over the years about the Replication Crisis in the social sciences as academics attempt to emulate Malcolm Gladwell’s success on the corporate conference circuit. The New York Times Magazine offers a long sympathetic article about the Power Posing lady at Harvard Business School who has made a lot of money off her claim to have scientifically proven that certain powerful postures will help you get jobs and sales:
When the Revolution Came for Amy CuddyAs a young social psychologist, she played by the rules and won big: an influential study, a viral TED talk, a prestigious job at Harvard. Then, suddenly, the rules changed.
Blogger Andrew Gelman gets cast in the article as the unsympathetic hardass who hurts the feelings of Dr. Cuddy. (Here’s Gelman responding.)
Dr. Cuddy looks rather like Phoebe on Friends. Granted, that’s not quite the same as looking like Rachel or Monica on Friends, but it’s not bad by academic standards. She probably was not used to being treated in an unladylike manner. She was likely more used to being treated as a cute blonde than as a scientist.
At the end of the article, Dr. Cuddy is getting out of the social science racket and more into writing motivational books and speaking. That’s kind of like how Malcolm Gladwell responded to the barrage of criticism that built up from 2005 onward. That seems reasonable. Some people have a real gift for telling people what they want to hear and they deserve to get paid for it.
COMMENTS:
* One of the subtexts of the article is that all the nasty, bullying, rigid, statistical types were men, and the greatest proportion of their poor, heart-of-gold, victim types were women.
If it weren’t for the Patriarchy and its disgusting mansplaining, power posing would be a real thing, and Cuddy would still be riding high, sharing the stage perhaps with Elizabeth Holmes.
* I haven’t read or heard anything from these TEDTalk social-psych Ph.D.’s that is not covered in the works of charlatan Dale Carnegie or con-man Napoleon Hill.
* One of women’s core competencies is playing by the rules with the goal of getting a trophy at the end without having to actually accomplish something of importance. That is why female students flourish in the educational system, academia in non STEM fields, and highly bureaucratic but non productive fields like HR. It is also why women tend not to flourish in startup companies in complex and rapidly changing fields like tech.
One of the more unintentionally humorous articles in the NYT in recent years was a look at why woman don’t flourish in tech startups. The two feminists found that women are more comfortable with bureaucracy rather than the free flowing, less structured cultures of startups. The proposed solution was for startups to be more bureaucratic to help the ladies. Yeah, that will work.
* If you want to get something done, call a man.
If you want to get someone kicked out, call a woman.
* To nearly all women in present Academia, who have been treated like hothouse flowers all their lives, any criticism constitutes “bullying.” That’s how far we have sunk….
I would add that statistics is based on an incredibly simple concept..Is what we are investigating likely to be real, or is it just an accident due to small data samples? What is the probability of either?
* Whichever sex invests more resources in offspring (usually the female, and pretty much always for placental mammals, given pregnancy and lactation), will see less variation in reproductive success, and cluster around a “safe” strategy, while the other sex, seeing more reproductive variance, compete with one another in pursuit of the higher-investing sex.
