Why "Fake It Till You Make It" is Terrible Advice

Faking confidence and swagger is a bad idea, because it doesn't work.

Embodied cognition-the idea that psychological processes and responses are shaped by the body's environmental interactions-is real. "Power posing, " or "faking it until you can make it" as a performance intervention is not.

If you want athletes to look confident, give them something tangible to be confident about. “Fake it till you make it” is one of the most repeated lines in sport, and it is the mating call of sport psychologists everywhere who are unaware of the research findings. So is the "power pose": two minutes in an expansive stance, followed by walking out there like you are confident.

I get why coaches like it. It is fast. It is splashy and exciting. It feels like a useful tool for your athletes. The problem is that the evidence says otherwise. The original power-posing paper (Carney, Cuddy, & Yap, 2010) had a sample of 42 people and claimed changes in testosterone, cortisol, risk-taking, and "felt" power. A later and larger replication study (Ranehill et al., 2015) did not find the hormonal or behavior effects. In 2016, the first author of the original paper said she no longer even believed the effects were real! A 2017 set of preregistered studies found essentially nothing on hormones or behavior. The best current review (Körner et al., 2022; 88 studies, nearly 10,000 people) lands here: Posture and body language can shift self-reported feelings of confidence in the short term. It does not reliably change physiology for any extended period of time, however.

This matters because we (coaches and sport psychology professionals) keep giving bad advice. Self-efficacy research and sport-confidence research point to the same concepts: mastery, preparation, and proof of work. Feeling ready because you have the receipts. not because you arranged your limbs a certain way in a hallway.

“Fake it till you make it” also trains bad habits in athletes, in that it tells athletes that body language can replace true performance readiness. However, when they meet a better trained opponent, a bad call, a missed shot, their body language adjustments are useless.

Here's what we should teach: Body language as an output, not as a performance trick.

Stand tall because you prepared well. Recover fast after a miss because you trained for it. Collect evidence for feeling confident.

True swagger can be the result.

Categories: : Mental Performance