Studies reporting bodily feedback effects on motivation have poor evidentiary value: a critical review and z-curve analysis

The embodied view of cognition holds that cognitive and emotional processes are grounded in our bodily experiences and physical interactions with the world. In line with this view, embodied motivation studies have purported to show that enacting motivation-related postures, expressions, and actions can elicit or modulate their corresponding motivational states. While theory-building reviews on the topic have accepted these studies’ conclusions at face value, a closer reading of key articles reveals several statistical issues that cast doubt on their veracity. The present review shows that evidence for bodily feedback effects on motivation relies on: (1) studies using multiple measures of motivation, and dismissing results from those that do not support hypotheses, (2) analytical degrees of freedom inflating the false positive rate, and (3) reviews on the topic interpreting non-significant hypothesis tests as if they were significant. Supporting this analysis of the literature, a z-curve on 52 significant results reported across 18 articles indicated little, if any, evidentiary value, with a dismal estimated replicability rate of 22%. In sum, there is little credible evidence that bodily postures modulate motivational states.