WHY THOSE EXTRA 5 MINUTES ARE IMPORTANT: WHAT YOU WEAR MAY CHANGE HOW PEOPLE HEAR WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY.

I am sure everyone has heard the saying “dress to impress,” and being psychology students I think we all would even understand the importance of this statement. Concern about appearance is quite normal and understandable. Attractive people have distinct advantages in our society. Studies show that attractive children are more popular, both with classmates and teachers. Attractive applicants have a better chance of getting jobs, and of receiving higher salaries. One US study found that taller men earned around $600 per inch more than shorter executives. Moreover, in court, attractive people are found guilty less often. When found guilty, they receive less severe sentences. After all isn’t the good fairy/princess always beautiful and the wicked stepmother is always ugly.

Despite being aware of the importance of attractiveness, I never made any effort to dress well. I never appreciated the fact that I had to dress a certain in order to get the respect I deserve or to get people to listen to me. But the other day I experienced something that really had an impact on me and changed my mind completely. I was on the bus headed to a friend’s house. I knew the neighbourhood but wasn’t sure which stop to get off at. The gentleman sitting next to me noticed me looking out the window every few seconds trying to get my bearings and asked if I needed help. I told him my predicament, and he confidently told me I should exit in two stops. I thanked him for the advice. A moment later, another man standing in the aisle that had heard my conversation leaned in and said, “Actually, you should get off at the next stop.” I thanked him and did as he said. And as soon as I exited the bus I realized what I had just done. I judged the advice from the two men based on how they were dressed. The man in the aisle was dressed sophisticatedly. He looked like he was on his way home from work in a crisp, well-ironed suit even though it was the end of the day. My seat mate, on the other hand, was wearing sweatpants, with a stain on his t-shirt and hair that seemed uncombed. I didn’t mean to make this judgment. It was simply years of social conditioning taking over. My decision process went into autopilot, and I realized how many preconceived notions and stereotypes were built into my own notion of other people.

The next day I tried to do a little experiment of my own and spent a good amount of time to choose what I wore and how I looked in the mirror when I left my house. It astonished me how differently people treated me. I am not talking about my friends and family, but just random people on the street. I got many more smiles and a more cheerful greeting at the coffee shop. I also felt more confident and was more productive in the day.

This got me thinking if there was a study done which looked at differences in attitudes towards people depending on how they dressed using the Implicit Association Task (IAT). For those of you who don’t know what it is, the IAT assesses how closely people’s brains link concepts, which can be as benign as “flowers and pretty” but can include items such as “blacks and bad”, and “women and passive.” Many social psychologists believe that these cognitive associations lead to “implicit bias,” which may influence subtle forms of discrimination. Employing such a tool for testing associations between the attitudes of people and dressing styles would confirm an implicit bias that we may possess and that we are unaware of. However, the IAT comes with its disadvantages. One of the most important ones being that there isn’t any established cut off score. But like most measures in social psychology, cut offs are mostly arbitrary. Moreover, the IAT also does not show reliable test-retest reliability so I should warn you that if you do intend to take this online test, take your scores with a bit of skepticism, which would come as good news for a lot of us. Lastly, the IAT taps in to the unconscious mind, and unless we can explicitly measure what our mind holds any measure of the implicit would contain some degree of uncertainty.

So the moral of the story is that the clothes you wear do not bestow upon you some magical power, and they do not give you the skills and qualities you would want to possess. But what they can do is prime your brain, and that of those you interact with to think that you do possess the qualities you want them to think you have.

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