How Wearing a White Coat Boosts Performance – “Enclothed Cognition”
Christopher Philip
Image courtesy of: http://www.vierdrie.nl
While the embodied version says people’s cognition is more than just a mind in jar (the brain as computer) and that the body plays an integral part of how people read their world, “enclothed cognition” says that how people dress also affects their cognition.
Researchers Adam and Galinsky, Northwestern University have found that simply by wearing a white lab coat – taking the role of ‘scientist’ – boosted people’s concentration on a task.
In fact, participants only made half as many errors as compared to those wearing their own clothing.
They knew they were on to something when their pretest showed that people found lab coats to be generally associated with attentiveness and carefulness
According to the researchers they offer a “unifying framework to integrate past findings and capture the diverse impact that clothes can have on the wearer by proposing that enclothed cognition involves the co-occurrence of two independent factors—the symbolic meaning of the clothes and the physical experience of wearing them.”
While we’ve known intuitively that dressing in a particular outfit can boost our confidence, or wearing a snazzy suite makes us feel more important, it hadn’t received much empirical support.
The results show just how entwined our physical world is with our internal world and cognition.
One might imagine how one feels and more importantly behaves and performs wearing particular attire. Would one do worse on a task wearing frumpy clothing? Quite likely.
However, when one dresses provocatively, does one act the part?
Does wearing a fedora make you more worldly? Do cool shades make you more mysterious? Does wearing a neck scarf make you more artistic?
Does wearing a swimsuit and doing math make you perform worse? Actually yes, but only if you’re a woman!
No doubt, our outer appearance highly influences our self concept, and as shown here, also affects our performance and attention. It turns out that our “elective nonverbal signals” affect more than the perception of other’s – they also dictate – to some extent, our own impressions about ourselves.
Resources
Adam, Hajo and Adam D. Galinsky. Enclothed Cognition. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 2019. 48 (4): 918–925. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2019.02.008 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103112000200
Image courtesy of: http://www.vierdrie.nl