Does what you wear affect how well you work?
Quite possibly. We've all had the experience of feeling more motivated and focused when we're dressed up for work. But new research shows that wearing certain items of clothing identified with certain qualities could help improve performance, too.
A recently published study from professors at Northwestern University shows that when research subjects wore a scientist or medical doctor's white coat, they performed better on what's known as the Stroop test, which asks participants to say the color of a word being shown on a flashcard, rather than the word itself.
The group who donned white jackets identified as lab coats performed better on conflicting flash cards, such as when the word "blue" is spelled in red letters. Those wearing the lab coats, which people typically associate with care and attentiveness, made about half as many errors as their peers.
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The researchers, Adam Galinsky and Hajo Adam, call their paper "Enclothed cognition," a play on the term "embodied cognition," the idea that bodily sensations can affect how we think and how we feel.
For example, the folks over at Miller-McCune magazine point to a 2010 study that found that body positions we think of as powerful (such as standing and leaning over a table or pumping out your chest) make people act more confident and even raise testosterone levels in the body.
Interestingly, the study subjects who wore similar white coats but were told they were artists' coats did not perform above average.
What does this mean for leaders? Much of the research on clothing has focused on how we're perceived, rather than how it affects our own behavior, just as most dress codes and workplace dress norms are established to set up a certain perception of the people who work there, rather than to make them feel, think or perform better.
