Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. We are a weekly guide to

the numbers all around us in the news and in life. And I'm Tim Halford.

Here on More or Less we love data. Delicious data. Data needs to be analysed though and

we often tend to assume that if you have good data, a competent analyst is going to reach

solid conclusions from it. The sorts of conclusions you can base scientific progress on, or

high quality evidence-based policy. But a new study has called that idea into question.

The research was led by Martin Shreinsberg, who's an assistant professor of organizational

behaviour at the Business School ESMT Berlin. I'm a psychologist but background. And when I

have these stats courses, I just remember feeling overwhelmed by all the rules and norms and things

I had to take into consideration. And invariably, my results differed quite strongly from those of

my peers. And I had always thought there was a result of me just kind of being incompetent at this.

But I also had this nagging feeling that maybe I'm not the only one.

Well, speaking of feeling competent and confident, there's a very famous psychological study by

Amy Cuddy and some colleagues. Amy is the most famous of those searches because she did this

blockbuster TED talk that's been watched many tens of millions of times.

Before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation, for two minutes, try doing this in the

elevator in a bathroom stall at your desk behind you. And that was a study of power posing.

And the idea that if you stand in certain poses, maybe the legs spread apart, growing thrust

forward as many politicians now seem to do, or sometimes call the Wonder Woman pose, this kind of thing.

It could affect your confidence, it could affect your mood.

So I want to ask you first, you know, both to try power posing. And also, I want to ask you

to share this science because this is simple. And then other researchers tried to

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