“I believe that we have been collectively bullied,” Amy Cuddy said. “We have been conditioned to shrink, to stay silent, to question our worth and to distrust each other.”
On March 27, Cuddy spoke at Balch Auditorium for Scripps Presents about the ups and downs of her career trajectory, the pervasive impact of a widespread bullying culture and how to reclaim personal power. Alex Hamilton SC ’25 moderated a discussion with Cuddy following the lecture.
A social psychologist, Cuddy researches power and its various manifestations. She is most well-known for her TED talk on power posing, which stands as the second-most viewed of all time. Cuddy has also written several books, most recently “Presence” and the upcoming “Bullies, Bystanders, and Bravehearts.”
Cuddy introduced her interest in personal power stemming from her second year of college, when she experienced a severe head injury, which led to a significant feeling of powerlessness during the recovery process.
Cuddy defines power with three aspects: core identity, sense of safety and community. In order to rebuild her sense of personal power after the head injury, she had to accept that her old self was gone and take the chance to reinvent herself.
“Trying to get back to that old self is like holding on to a wet ball of sand that’s drying in the sun and it’s slipping through your fingers,” Cuddy said. “It is a leap of faith to leave that and hope that someone else is out there. For me, I had to believe that another me was out there for me.”
Years after Cuddy thought she had experienced the last of powerlessness, she experienced a period of her life more challenging than recovering from her brain injury.
In 2014, the day before her wedding, a study by Eva Ranehill et al. invalidated Cuddy’s work on power posing, sparking backlash about her statistical approach. The study eventually ballooned into significant scrutiny of her work, leading her to leave her position as a professor at Harvard Business School and become the scapegoat of the replication crisis in social science.
Verifications of power posing have been mixed, but the concept has since been upheld by research.
Cuddy was severely isolated from the academic community and subject to relentless academic bullying for four years. However, this experience gave her insight into the psychology of bullying.
“Bullying is a sustained effort to erode another person’s power … They gain power by manipulating perception, exploiting group dynamics and silencing dissent,” Cuddy said. “There’s no treatment plan for that kind of psychological and reputational and social injury.”
Attendee and community member Lori Michno was surprised by this particular part of Cuddy’s story.
“I had seen her TED talk about body language, but I didn’t know that part of her story and how she endured it and how that affects her research today,” Michno said.
The wider impact of bullying can be fatal. For example, the 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion has been linked to cultures of bullying. Management bullied the shuttle’s engineers and contractors into agreeing to a launch in unsafe conditions.
“A bully without us is just another jerk.”
Oversights from a culture of bullying can also be deadly in a hospital setting, as experiments where surgeons are presented with mock emergency procedures to save an infant prove.
“When these surgeons are in a bullying environment, that infant is more likely to die. Why? Because they are afraid to ask questions because they don’t want to look stupid,” Cuddy said. “They’re afraid to share information because they have a scarcity mindset, and that leads to the worst possible outcomes.”
Cuddy reminded the audience that a bully only has power with our help.
“A bully without us is just another jerk,” she said.
Bullying, she continued, does not exist just on an individual, small group level.
“We have to accept that all of us have participated in [bullying], and all of us have been harmed by it, all of us. We are capable of something better. We can build what I’m calling a bravehearted culture,” Cuddy said.
Attendee Anna Ravid SC ’25 found Cuddy’s thoughts on the collective nature of bullying to be particularly thought-provoking.
“Bullying takes a whole group of people … It’s a whole system of complicity,” Ravid said. “I thought it was a good way to view bullying and other social problems.”
To end her talk, Cuddy suggested several strategies that we can use to deal with cultures of stress and bullying. Deep breathing, slower speech, better posture and power posing are all ways to increase a feeling of power.
Cuddy challenges us to confront the bullying in our daily lives, to be the bravehearts and not the bystanders.
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