It’s always fun for me to watch people trying on costumes for Halloween.  Their body language changes, their demeanor shifts, and some sort of alter ego emerges.  It got me thinking about our clothes and the influence it has on us. Fun fact, as it turns out, there is a developing psychology all about this! 

“Embodied cognition” is the study of how our thought processes are based on our physical experiences that set off abstract processes.  For example, research shows that washing your hands is associated with a sense of 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. And if you carry a heavy clipboard, you will feel more important! A group of researchers took this a step further to investigate “enclothed cognition,”looking at the “systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer’s psychological processes.”  In other words, what do the clothes you wear say to you, not about you, and how this influences how you behave. 

Researchers at Northwestern University did a series of experiments having subjects wear either a doctors coat, an artists smock, or street clothes.  Despite the fact that the doctor’s coat and the artist’s smock were actually absolutely identical, the people wearing what they believed was the doctor’s coat performed much better on  tasks and were more careful and attentive. Just looking at the doctor’s coat had no effect on performance, it was only when subjects had it on did it change their outcomes. The researchers conclude that “the influence of clothes depends both on wearing the clothing and the meaning it invokes in their psychological schema.”  Doctors are generally thought to be highly intelligent, precise, and scientific thinkers, while artists are generally thought to be free thinking creative types. People ascribed a symbolic meaning to an article of clothing and while wearing it, took on the character strength they perceived.  

Enclothed cognition gives scientific proof to the idea that you should dress not how you feel, but how you want to feel.  The clothes you choose are sending messages to those around you, but also to yourself! When you dress a certain way, it does influence your internal self.  When you feel low or nervous about a job at hand, dressing up can change things. Clothes influence the body and the brain, putting us in a state of expectation that alters how we approach and interact with our world, and in turn, how the world responds to us.  We have uniforms of all types in our lives, beyond what we wear to work. What we wear to the grocery store, to work out in, or on a date may have more influence than we realize in how we things go for us.  

So this Halloween have some fun!  Try on an outfit very different from your comfortable self.  How does it make you feel? How does it affect how you hold your body posture? Your attitude?  Does it make you feel more powerful or more attractive? Bolder or sillier? Then imagine how you might use this in what you choose to wear each morning.   This new research shows it to be at least somewhat true, that clothes makes the man (or woman)!