A pair, drawn from abstracts · the eight full-text graphs

Power posing and its re-test

Carney, Cuddy and Yap reported that two one-minute poses raise testosterone, lower cortisol, and raise felt power and risk tolerance. Ranehill, Dreber, Johannesson, Leiberg, Sul and Weber re-ran the design in the same journal five years later with 200 participants and an experimenter blind to condition, and found the felt-power effect but none of the others. The graph shows the claim, the supporting evidence, the opposing evidence, and which sub-claim survived.

Social Sciences & Humanities · a pair · closed access. Drawn from the abstracts, because these full texts are not open. No experiment is proposed on this page: a design needs the methods section, and a graph of a paper that is not CC BY cannot carry one here. The eight · All graphs

How to read these graphs

A discourse graph breaks a piece of research into typed one-sentence nodes and draws how they bear on one another. The grammar is that of Discourse Graphs (Chan and Akamatsu). Read each graph left to right: a question, the experiments that addressed it, the results they produced, and the hypothesis every result is drawn against.

QUE Question: What the work set out to answer.
HYP Hypothesis: The answer the authors expected. Every result earns one edge against it.
EXP Experiment: One attempt at the question: a trial arm, an assay, a survey, an analysis.
RES Result: One finding from an experiment, with where in the source it comes from.
ISS Issue: An open question or untried branch the work leaves for someone else.

addresses: An experiment addresses the question.
produces: An experiment produces a result.
supports: A positive result that backs the hypothesis.
opposes: A negative result that counts as evidence against the hypothesis, or a refutation of an earlier claim.
informs: A partial or mixed result that bears on the hypothesis without settling it.
consistent with: A negative or inconclusive result that does not count either way: no positive control passed, or there is no sensitivity or power statement, so the absence of an effect cannot be told from a measurement that failed.
relation: A thin dotted line: a link the source itself states between two experiments, such as one being derived from another.

A dashed box marks a result the rule above counts as uninformative, or an issue. In the drawing, click a node to jump to its text below.

Power posing and its re-test (Psychological Science, 2010 and 2015)

Social Sciences & Humanities · a pair · closed access

Read left to right. The question (QUE) is addressed by 2 experiments (EXP), each producing results (RES), and each result bears on the hypothesis (HYP). 5 support it, 3 oppose it, 0 inform it. Issues (ISS) hang below: what the paper leaves open.

supports positive finding
opposes a negative with a control and a stated sensitivity, or a failed replication
informs bears on the question without deciding the hypothesis
thin grey a relation between two experiments

Nodes, in reading order. Sources: Carney, Cuddy & Yap 2010, 10.1177/0956797610383437; Ranehill et al. 2015, 10.1177/0956797614553946 (abstract not exposed by the indexing APIs; the sample size, blinding and results are taken from the University of Zurich press release and should be checked against the paper).
Node	Text	Type	Outcome	Edge
EXP	Carney, Cuddy & Yap 2010: participants held high- or low-power poses for two minutes; saliva, risk task and self-report All four predicted effects reported.	`laboratory experiment`	`positive`
RES	Testosterone rose in high-power posers and fell in low-power posers. salivary testosterone		`positive` informative	supports HYP
RES	Cortisol fell in high-power posers and rose in low-power posers. salivary cortisol		`positive` informative	supports HYP
RES	High-power posers reported feeling more powerful. self-reported power		`positive` informative	supports HYP
RES	High-power posers showed greater tolerance for risk. gambling task		`positive` informative	supports HYP
EXP	Ranehill et al. 2015: 200 participants, experimenter blind to condition, the three original tasks plus two added Felt power replicated; hormones and behaviour did not.	`conceptual replication`	`partial`
RES	No differential change in testosterone between high- and low-power posers. salivary testosterone		`negative-not-replicated` informative	opposes HYP
RES	No differential change in cortisol. salivary cortisol		`negative-not-replicated` informative	opposes HYP
RES	No significant effect on any behavioural task: the original risk task, loss-domain risk, or willingness to compete. behavioural tasks		`negative-not-replicated` informative	opposes HYP
RES	Significant effect of posing on self-reported feelings of power, as in the original. self-reported power		`positive` informative	supports HYP

ISS Felt power is the one sub-claim that survives. Whether it drives any physiological or behavioural change is untested here. (open-question)
ISS The original sample was small and the experimenter was not blind. Which of those explains the difference? (open-question)
ISS A pre-registered direct replication with the original protocol and a blind experimenter. (untried)

Licence

These two graphs are drawn from the abstracts of papers that are not open access. The abstracts are freely readable on journals.sagepub.com, nothing beyond them was used, and the graphs quote them only in short. They are kept because each shows a claim and the later SAGE paper that tested it, in one picture.