Whether you are on a suit, khakis, police uniform, a golf shirt, white coat, military wear and office dress; they all have profound effect on the way you act. Because, uniforms conferred some of their connotations onto the behavior of their wearers – says new study.
Findings on the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, emphasize on a scientific field called embodied cognition. Which explains that ‘We think not just with our brains but with our bodies’. And they include the clothes we wear.
A little effort put into your clothing can make you think a certain way and have a positive—or negative—impact on your performance.
When that clothing provides a degree of anonymity: Jerome Singer, a cognitive psychologist calls the process by which people lose themselves in their external surroundings deindividuation,
The way you perceive military wears is different from that of police forces. If police officer switch to wearing military uniform, you automatically transfer the military perception on him.
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Just the way you as an observer sees this, the same cues that signal “army” and “conflict” to you as a civilian may affect police officers themselves. Because, that perception, in turn, may well affect the types of decisions they actually make.
In one early study, a take on the famous Milgram paradigm, in which women were asked to deliver electric shocks to another woman whenever she made a mistake, women who wore Ku Klux Klan uniforms delivered more shocks than those who wore nurses’ uniforms. The implication was that uniforms conferred some of their connotations onto the behavior of their wearers.
If you wear a white coat that you believe belongs to a doctor, your ability to pay attention increases sharply. But if you wear the same white coat believing it belongs to a painter, you will show no such improvement – NYTimes.
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In a recent study, where some portion of the participants dressed in different clothing but half of them wore lab coats. Those on lab coats made far fewer mistakes than those without.
In conclusion, clothes invade the brain and hold a strange power over their wearers.
