Enclothed Cognition
In 2012, the doctors Adam Galinsky and Hajo Adam conducted an experiment in which they had research subjects wear a white coat, and then tested them on their performance of various tasks.
The subjects performed better on attention-related tasks, on average, when they were told the white coat was a doctor’s coat and when they had a preexisting sense that doctors wore white coats.
This effect was not seen when the subject either didn’t have any associations about doctors and white coats, or when they were told that the coat they wore was a painter’s coat.
The term “enclothed cognition” was coined by this pair in reference to the impact the clothing we wear can have on our psychological state. And though they tested the white coat effect specifically, other studies have gone on to demonstrate a slew of fashion-related cognitive effects, including research that shows wearing what we perceive to be formal clothing tends to make us feel more powerful and confident but also less friendly and, by some metrics, less creative, and that wearing what we perceive to be luxury items, including specific brands we associate with luxury, can influence our political views. According to one such study, the higher-end we perceive our clothes to be, the more conservative our views become.
This realm of inquiry intersects and overlaps with other research niches.
The study of color psychology, for instance, seems to play a role here, as the colors we wear can influence our mood, with brighter colors making us overall more upbeat and happy and duller colors evoking a more mellow outlook.
Our habits can also be swayed by the clothes we wear: research has shown, for instance, that wearing gym clothes, or other types of clothing that we perceive to be “activewear,” makes us more likely to stick with an exercise regimen and to make other sorts of healthy choices, like those related to our diet.
There’s evidence that some of these effects are related to how we believe other people perceive us based on the clothes we’re wearing, while other studies suggest that at least some of these effects stem from our own awareness, rather than those of other people.
A 2010 study, for instance, found that a woman’s choice in underwear can reinforce either feelings of personal neglect, or serve as positive identity trait reinforcement.
In other words, the women in this study were found to be influenced by the underwear they put on under their other clothes, and that choice of undergarment influenced how they felt, including aspects of their sense of their own capabilities and self-worth.
Which makes sense if you think of clothing and other fashion accouterments as opportunities to express something about ourselves to the world, tweak the signals we’re sending other people about who we are and what we care about, and as a sort of uniform we put on to prepare ourselves for various sorts of activities and ways of thinking.
What’s currently unknown is how many of these findings are socially constructed and reinforced, and how many are universal if distinct in their details from culture to culture.
Societies that have traditionally imbued clothing and accessories with meaning, and which thus have rich histories of using such items to declare social status, wealth, availability, profession, and other such attributes, could see those traditions live on as subconscious cues, even in an age where such signals are less overt and are no longer officially regulated.
People living within these sorts of societies would seem to be more inclined to pick up on and participate in this dynamic than someone growing up in a culture in which everyone wears the same uniform each day, or in which people wear little or no clothing, at all; but we can’t say that for certain, based on the research that’s been conducted up till this point.
For now, it does seem to be a fairly safe bet that our clothing and other fashion choices are connected in some way to our psychological state, and that this connection seems to go both ways—our mindset influences what we wear, and what we wear influences our mindset—and that this connection seems to be predicated on both our self-perception and our sense of how others perceive us.
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