How Do Clothes Affect Behavior?

From the Marshall Memo #443

“Want to run the world? Start by tucking in your shirt,” says Merel van Beeren in this Psychology Today article reporting on research on the effect of clothing on behavior. She describes an experiment by Northwestern University psychologists Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky (in the Journal of Experimental Psychology) in which participants completed various tasks. Some were wearing a white lab coat (associated with attentive and caring doctors), some worked with a lab coat in their field of vision, and some neither wore nor looked at a lab coat. Those who wore a lab coat did significantly better at the tasks than the other two groups – unless they were told it was a painter’s coat. This shows that wardrobe-inspired behavior change is not just the result of a pre-existing mood or a reaction to the responses of onlookers. 

How does this work outside the lab? “Sometimes a mood catches up with an outfit, but what we wear is generally based on how we feel,” says clinical psychologist and author Jennifer Baumgartner. In sports, players’ uniforms have been shown to affect their behavior. Black jerseys are perceived as more malevolent, and those who wear black tend to play more aggressively. In studies in the 1980s and 90s, Cornell psychologists Mark Frank and Thomas Gilovich found that study participants wearing black jerseys chose more aggressive games to play against a fictional opponent. They also found that National Hockey League teams wearing black received more penalties – but in another study, they discovered that football referees gave more penalties to players in black than players in white, even when their actions were the same. “Your behavior is often in tune with what you’re wearing,” says Santa Clara University psychologist Jerry Burger, “but people are going to quibble about why.” 

“Dress to Impress Yourself” by Merel van Beeren in Psychology Today, July/August 2012 (Vol. 45, #4, p. 39), no e-link available