Amy Cuddy

Dr. Amy Cuddy is a social psychologist, bestselling author, and acclaimed keynote speaker. She is also well-known for her keynote and motivational speaking. Her writing, research, teaching, and speaking focus on presence and performance under stress, the causes and outcomes of feeling powerful vs. powerless, prejudice and stereotyping, nonverbal behavior, the delicate balance of projecting trustworthiness and strength, and most recently, the psychology of bullying, bystanding, and social bravery.

Amy Cuddy is available to be booked for corporate and private events. Contact the Mollie Plotkin Group today to inquire about Amy Cuddy’s fees.

Want to book Amy Cuddy for an event?

Contact the Mollie Plotkin Group at 215-995-0905 to book Amy Cuddy for a keynote speech, corporate event, leadership program, workshop, fireside chat, virtual appearance, or other private or professional event.

Our team will help confirm Amy Cuddy’s availability, speaking fee, travel requirements, and fit for your audience. To start the booking process, please share your event date, location, audience size, event format, and the type of presentation you are looking for.

The Mollie Plotkin Group is a full-service keynote speaker agency and entertainment bureau that helps organizations secure keynote speakers, entertainers, athletes, celebrities, and thought leaders for corporate meetings, conferences, fundraisers, and special events.

Traumatic Brain Injury

During college, Amy Cuddy suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. Doctors said she would struggle to fully regain her mental capacity and finish her undergraduate degree. She proved them wrong, eventually earning her doctorate from Princeton in 2005.

Her remarkable road to recovery, battle against imposter syndrome, and ultimate ascension have become a foundational part of her journey as a social scientist. It’s also a facet of her life that resonates powerfully with a strikingly broad range of people.

Amy has earned numerous awards over her esteemed career. Among the most prominent, she has been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, one of 50 Women Changing the World by Business Insider, a Top 50 Management Thinker by Thinkers50, and one of the BBC 100 Women.

Teaching

Since earning her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2005, Amy has served as a full-time professor at Rutgers University (2005-2006), Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management (2006-2008), and Harvard Business School (2008-2017). As a Harvard Lecturer in 2018, she won an Excellence in Teaching Award. She has also taught in Executive Education programs at Harvard Business School and, more recently, UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Research

For over 20 years, Amy has rigorously researched stereotyping and prejudice, nonverbal behavior, and presence and performance under stress. Her doctoral dissertation at Princeton University presented a paradigm-shifting scientific model that became one of the most cited theories in social psychology — and ultimately changed psychologists’ understanding of the nature and mechanics of prejudice, stereotyping, discrimination, and even more broadly, how we form first impressions of each other.

In short, her research revealed that (1) people immediately evaluate each other on two dimensions: warmth/trustworthiness and competence/strength; and (2) these evaluations, accurate or not, powerfully direct how they feel about and interact with each other. This theory has changed both academic and popular thinking on leadership, marketing, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Scientific Impact Award

In 2022, Amy and her co-authors on this work, Profs. Susan Fiske and Peter Glick, earned the Scientific Impact Award, an award given annually to the most impactful paper in social psychology.

Media

Top academic journals, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and a range of internationally-known publications, like The Economist, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Wired, and Fast Company have all cited Amy’s research. She has appeared on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Today Show, CBS This Morning, and BBC World News, among others. Amy has also written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Harvard Business Review, and CNN.

TED Talk

Her 2012 TED Talk, “Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are,” has more than 73 million views – making it the third-most popular TED video of all time. Named by The Guardian as “One of 20 Online Talks that Could Change Your Life,” her talk has influenced how building confidence under stressful situations is taught and practiced worldwide. A pop-culture phenomenon, Amy and her keynote have been referenced in the TV shows Ted Lasso, Grey’s Anatomy (four times), Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, The Bold Type, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and others.

Presence

Amy’s first book Presence is a New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Publisher’s Weekly, and Globe & Mail bestseller. The book has been published in 35 languages and sold over half a million copies. As described in the New York Times Sunday Book Review:

“Cuddy brings an abundance of humility and charm to the page. Her presence itself–her openhearted desire to help the insecure and the uneasy in this age of anxiety–shines through. Presence feels at once concrete and inspiring, simple but ambitious–above all, truly powerful.”

Bullies, Bystanders, and Bravehearts

In 2027, Amy will publish her next book, Bullies, Bystanders, & Bravehearts. The book delves into the psychological causes and consequences of bullying among adults – a pervasive and often devastating problem. Propelled by extraordinary new insights, she’ll share the concrete steps that we must all take to move toward social bravery in our daily lives and broader culture, concluding that we all have the power to become bravehearts.

To hire Amy Cuddy for an event, contact the Mollie Plotkin Group with the proposed event date, location, audience size, event format and program goals. Amy Cuddy is available for corporate events, conferences, leadership meetings, private events, workshops, fireside chats and virtual programs.

After receiving your request, a Mollie Plotkin Group booking agent will review Amy Cuddy’s availability, discuss the event details and get back to you within 48 hours with next steps for securing Amy Cuddy for your program.

The cost to book Amy Cuddy depends on the event date, location, format, audience size and scope of the appearance. Amy Cuddy’s speaking fee ranges from $65,000 to $75,000, while virtual programs typically range from $40,000 to $50,000. Speaking fees may vary for keynote speeches, workshops, fireside chats, private events, corporate meetings and virtual programs.

For the most accurate Amy Cuddy booking fee, contact the Mollie Plotkin Group with your event details. Our team will help confirm availability, pricing and the best format for your event.

Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

Build authentic confidence and perform with greater presence when the stakes are high.

Too often we approach our lives’ biggest hurdles with dread, execute them with anxiety, and leave them with regret. In this program based on her bestselling book and viral TED talk, Dr. Amy Cuddy explores how presence, body language, and mindset shape our ability to show up fully in high-stakes moments. Audiences will:

• Understand how body language influences how we feel about ourselves and what it communicates to others
• Learn simple yet effective science-backed strategies for accessing authentic confidence in the moment and overcoming imposter syndrome in the long run
• Develop habits that make it easier to perform at your peak during stressful moments

Ideal for: Client-facing teams, C-suite leadership, women’s organizations, and any audience that serves to benefit from a confidence boost.

Perform: The New Science of Human Performance Under Social Pressure

Understand how social pressure, evaluation, and connection shape performance when the stakes are high.

We are performing more often, for more people, under more pressure than ever before. The presentation. The interview. The pitch. The difficult conversation. The meeting that gets recorded and replayed. But the pressure doesn’t stop at work. The athlete stepping onto the field. The musician walking onstage. The creator going live. Modern life has become intensely performative—and intensely evaluative. Yet most advice about peak performance still treats performance as a private act of confidence, discipline, or talent. In this talk, Dr. Amy Cuddy—whose work on the psychology of performance appears in The Athletic Peak—reveals a radically different way of understanding what allows people to perform at their best under pressure. We are carrying more social load than any generation before us: the pressure of constant evaluation, invisible audiences, recordings that live forever, comment threads, past failures, and the internalized voices we carry into every room. And most performance training hasn’t caught up to that reality. Blending groundbreaking research, powerful storytelling, and insights from sports, music, leadership, and media, Amy shows how the social environment around us shapes what our bodies and brains are actually capable of accessing when the stakes are high — and why connection, trust, and presence are often the hidden forces behind extraordinary performance.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand how social pressure and constant evaluation affect performance
• Recognize the role of connection, trust, and presence in high-stakes moments
• Rethink performance as a social experience rather than a private act of confidence or talent

Ideal for: Leaders, athletes, musicians, creators, media professionals, and teams that regularly perform under social pressure.

Trust Under Pressure

Learn how leaders can build trust when uncertainty, disruption, and pressure are at their highest.

In a workplace shaped by constant disruption, uncertainty, burnout, and rapid technological change, trust has become one of the most important leadership capacities—and one of the fastest-rising areas of demand in leadership development. As work becomes more uncertain and pressure intensifies, trust becomes harder to build, easier to lose, and more essential to performance, resilience, and effective leadership. In this talk, Dr. Amy Cuddy explores what happens to human behavior under pressure—how stress and uncertainty affect the way people think, connect, communicate, and perform—and why trust becomes even more important when the stakes are high. Drawing on decades of research in social psychology and human behavior, she explores why, as she argues, “trust is the conduit of influence,” how leaders build trust in moments of uncertainty and change, and why the leaders who do this well are better equipped to guide people through challenge, transformation, and sustained pressure.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand how stress and uncertainty affect communication, connection, and performance
• Learn why trust becomes more important as pressure intensifies
• Explore how leaders can build trust during uncertainty and change

Ideal for: Leadership teams and organizations navigating disruption, uncertainty, transformation, and sustained pressure.

How Fear, Cruelty, and Silence Take Hold – and How Brave Leaders Stop Them

Recognize harmful workplace dynamics and learn how social bravery can interrupt them.

At a time when toxic workplace cultures are a leading driver of turnover, burnout, and lost performance, Dr. Amy Cuddy offers a timely and practical framework for leaders that want to do better. In this program grounded in the research and case studies in her forthcoming book, Bullied, Dr. Cuddy shows how individuals and organizations can interrupt harmful dynamics, rebuild trust, and create environments where people can do their best work. She explores:

• The concept of social bravery
• Why bullying, mobbing, and fear-based norms spread in otherwise “good” organizations
• The social and psychological dynamics of bystanders, allies, and “bravehearts” who change the script
• Practical tools for leaders to spot early warning signs, disrupt harmful behavior without creating new fear, and build environments where people feel safe to speak up and contribute

Ideal for: Both leadership teams and employees at every level of an organization.

Brave Cultures: Turning Toxic Norms into Trust, Courage, and High Performance

Create a workplace culture where trust, psychological safety, and shared courage can grow.

There once was a time when toxic workplaces were the norm. Screaming bosses, non-existent boundaries, high stress, low morale. Today, employees have much higher expectations for psychological safety and accountability and are quick to leave workplaces that don’t meet their needs. In this program, social psychologist Dr. Amy Cuddy presents her “brave cultures” framework and teaches leaders how to foster an environment where employees can thrive. She explores:

• How cultures of fear and disengagement quietly drain performance and innovation—and why disengagement now represents trillions in lost productivity globally
• The levers leaders can pull to shift norms from silence and cynicism to trust, psychological safety, and shared courage
• Simple, research-backed practices to make “brave behavior” visible, rewarded, and contagious across teams

Ideal for: Corporate leadership teams in industries with a history of employee burnout and high turnover rates such as tech, finance, and healthcare.