Entry #4: Enclothed Cognition

 "Enclothed Cognition" is something that I discovered recently that I find to be quite interesting. It is a term that is used to describe the effect the symbolic meaning of clothing has on us. For example, wearing a painter's coat is associated with creativity, so wearing one potentially makes you more creative. The study on enclothed cognition was done in 2012, and there hasn't been any studies on it since. I want to analyze that study and see if enclothed cognition is a real thing.

Before the first experiment, Adam and Galinsky, the authors of the study, conducted a survey to figure out what attributes people associated with lab coats. (lab coats were the clothing being tested) They discovered that lab coats were associated with attention and designed a Stroop test to determine the effects the lab coat had on the 58 participants. The experiment found that the people in their own clothes had twice as many errors as the people with lab coats on. 

This is what participants not in the control group would have been wearing

                                                                                   

The second experiment tested different types of clothing, and whether the clothes needed to be worn for effects to appear. There were three groups: one wearing lab coats, one wearing a painter's coat, and another with a lab coat displayed in front of them. The tests given to participants were similar to the first experiment, testing attention. The lab coat wearers were the group with the highest performance, and the other two had similar, poor performance.

The final experiment tested whether establishing a connection between the wearer and the clothing item could replicate the effects of wearing the item. The experiment was exactly like the second, expect an additional group of people wrote about how they identified with the lab coat. The results were the same as the second, with lab coat wearers performing the best of the three groups. Only 98 people were tested. 

The result of these experiments is fantasizing and give creditability to the idea of enclothed cognition. However, the low participation in the experiments and the fact that this is the only study means that there should be more studies on enclothed cognition before it is proven fact. What are your thoughts on enclothed cognition?