I was working late last Friday night and caught one of the last commuter trains back to the suburbs. I happened to be wearing a suit that day, and one of my fellow commuters noticed and acknowledged that the two of us were "probably the only two people on the train wearing a suit that night". He was correct - everyone else was dressed for going out for a fun Friday night. My fellow commuter told me that whenever he worked downtown, he usually wore a suit. I don't remember his exact words, but he said something to the effect that we should always dress for the occasion and how we dress makes an impact on how we feel and how we are perceived.
His comments reminded me of the old adage that "the clothes make the man", which is often attributed to the American author, Mark Twain. It is true that Twain wrote the following passage in his short story "The Czar’s Soliloquy" in 1905:
[One] realizes that without his clothes a man would be nothing at all; that the clothes do not merely make the man, the clothes are the man; that without them he is a cipher, a vacancy, a nobody, a nothing… There is no power without clothes.
Regardless of its origin, there is now scientific proof to suggest that how we dress truly impacts how we feel, and how we feel has an impact on how we show up, how we portray ourselves, and how we are perceived by others. It's called "enclothed cognition", a term first used by the American psychologists Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky in a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Adam and Galinsky cite other examples to support their findings, including the popular book, Dress for Success by John T. Molloy or the television series, What Not to Wear. They write, "...the clothes we wear have power not only over others, but also over ourselves."
In the first experiment, Adam and Galinsky randomly assigned college undergraduate students to one of two conditions - wearing a lab coat versus not wearing a lab coat. Subjects were next asked to perform a series of selective attention tasks (known as the Stroop test), in which they had to focus on relevant stimuli while ignoring irrelevant stimuli. Those students wearing a lab coat made about half as many errors as those who weren't wearing a lab coat. It was almost as if wearing a lab coat (a status symbol of knowledge authority and expertise) increased the students' level of confidence, allowing them to successfully perform their task.
In the second experiment, Adam and Galinsky again randomly assigned college undergraduate students, this time to one of three conditions - wearing a lab coat versus wearing a painter's coat versus seeing a lab coat. The students were told that local officials were thinking about making certain clothes mandatory for certain professions in their area, and one of the purposes of the study was to determine what people think about the clothes. The interesting part about this experiment was that students in the lab coat and painter's coat group actually wore the same coat, it was just described as a doctor's coat in the first group and a painter's coat in the second. Students in the third group merely saw a lab coat displayed on a table across the room. The students were next asked to perform a sustained attention task. Again, students in the lab coat group were more successful at the task compared to the other two groups, consistent with Adam and Galinsky's concept of "enclothed cognition".
The results of the second experiment demonstrated that wearing a lab coat led to greater success in the sustained attention task and that this effect depended on whether (1) the clothes were worn and (2) the symbolic meaning of those clothes. Of interest, there was no difference between the painter's coat group and the group who saw the doctor's coat. In the last experiment, college undergraduate students were randomized to one of three conditions - wearing a doctor's coat versus wearing a painter's coat versus identifying with a doctor's coat. The experimental set-up was very similar to the second experiment, except in the "identifying with a doctor's coat", students saw the doctor's coat during the entire experiment and were asked to write an essay about how the coat represents them and has a personal meaning (this was to "prime" the students to closely identify with the lab coat). Students who wore the doctor's coat still performed better on the sustained attention task, however this time, the students who identified with the doctor's coat performed better than those students who wore the painter's coat.
I remember once during residency at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego several years ago a fellow resident asking me why I was wearing a lab coat in clinic over my Navy uniform. I responded, "Because I am a doctor." I do think that there is something to this concept known as "enclothed cognition". I do think that we should all be "dressing for success". Regardless of our own opinions, the clothes that we wear do have an impact, not only on how we feel, but how we are perceived by others. I can't help but wonder how the recent trends towards a "casual workplace" have adversely impacted how different professions are perceived.
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