If you wear a white coat that you believe belongs
to a doctor, your ability to pay attention increases sharply. But if you
wear the same white coat believing it belongs to a painter, you will
show no such improvement.
So scientists report after studying a phenomenon they call enclothed cognition: the effects of clothing on cognitive processes.
It is not enough to see a doctor’s coat hanging in your doorway, said Adam D. Galinsky, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, who led the study.
The effect occurs only if you actually wear the coat and know its
symbolic meaning — that physicians tend to be careful, rigorous and good
at paying attention.
The findings, on the Web site of The Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, are a twist on a growing scientific field called embodied cognition.
We think not just with our brains but with our bodies, Dr. Galinsky
said, and our thought processes are based on physical experiences that
set off associated abstract concepts. Now it appears that those
experiences include the clothes we wear.
“I love the idea of trying to figure out why, when we put on certain
clothes, we might more readily take on a role and how that might affect
our basic abilities,” said Joshua I. Davis, an assistant professor of
psychology at Barnard College and expert on embodied cognition
who was not involved with the study. This study does not fully explain
how this comes about, he said, but it does suggest that it will be worth
exploring various ideas.
There is a huge body of work on embodied cognition, Dr. Galinsky
said. The experience of washing your hands is associated with moral
purity and ethical judgments. People rate others personally warmer if
they hold a hot drink in their hand, and colder if they hold an iced
drink. If you carry a heavy clipboard, you will feel more important.
It has long been known that “clothing affects how other people
perceive us as well as how we think about ourselves,” Dr. Galinsky said.
Other experiments have shown that women who dress in a masculine
fashion during a job interview are more likely to be hired, and a
teaching assistant who wears formal clothes is perceived as more
intelligent than one who dresses more casually.
But the deeper question, the researchers said, is whether the
clothing you wear affects your psychological processes. Does your outfit
alter how you approach and interact with the world? So Dr. Galinsky and
his colleague Hajo Adam conducted three experiments in which the clothes did not vary but their symbolic meaning was manipulated.
In the first, 58 undergraduates were randomly assigned to wear a
white lab coat or street clothes. Then they were given a test for
selective attention based on their ability to notice incongruities, as
when the word “red” appears in the color green. Those who wore the white
lab coats made about half as many errors on incongruent trials as those
who wore regular clothes.
In the second experiment, 74 students were randomly assigned to one
of three options: wearing a doctor’s coat, wearing a painter’s coat or
seeing a doctor’s coat. Then they were given a test for sustained
attention. They had to look at two very similar pictures side by side on
a screen and spot four minor differences, writing them down as quickly
as possible.
Those who wore the doctor’s coat, which was identical to the
painter’s coat, found more differences. They had acquired heightened
attention. Those who wore the painter’s coat or were primed with merely
seeing the doctor’s coat found fewer differences between the images.
The third experiment explored this priming effect more thoroughly.
Does simply seeing a physical item, like the coat, affect behavior?
Students either wore a doctor’s coat or a painter’s coat, or were told
to notice a doctor’s lab coat displayed on the desk in front of them for
a long period of time. All three groups wrote essays about their
thoughts on the coats. Then they were tested for sustained attention.
Again, the group that wore the doctor’s coat showed the greatest
improvement in attention. You have to wear the coat, see it on your body
and feel it on your skin for it to influence your psychological
processes, Dr. Galinsky said.
Clothes invade the body and brain, putting the wearer into a
different psychological state, he said. He described his own experience
from last Halloween (or maybe it should be called National Enclothed
Cognition Day).
He had decided to dress as a pimp, with a fedora, long coat and cane.
“When I entered the room, I glided in,” he said. “I felt a very
different presence.”
But what happens, he mused, if you wear pimp clothes every day? Or a
priest’s robes? Or a police officer’s uniform? Do you become habituated
so that cognitive changes do not occur? Do the effects wear off?
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