Interesting Study; Possibly Pro-Black Hats

I assume that a link to the NYTimes website won’t get through, so I’ll just copy and paste the interesting piece here. (I left it in the original; Mods, you may want to slightly change a few of the paragraphs towards the end. I’ll leave that decision up to you.)

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.

So scientists report after studying a phenomenon they call enclothed cognition: the effects of clothing on cognitive processes.

The findings, on the Web site of The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, are a twist on a growing scientific field called embodied cognition. We think not just with our brains but with our bodies, Dr. Galinsky said, and our thought processes are based on physical experiences that set off associated abstract concepts. Now it appears that those experiences include the clothes we wear.

There is a huge body of work on embodied cognition, Dr. Galinsky said. The experience of washing your hands is associated with moral purity and ethical judgments. People rate others personally warmer if they hold a hot drink in their hand, and colder if they hold an iced drink. If you carry a heavy clipboard, you will feel more important.

But the deeper question, the researchers said, is whether the clothing you wear affects your psychological processes. Does your outfit alter how you approach and interact with the world? So Dr. Galinsky and his colleague Hajo Adam conducted three experiments in which the clothes did not vary but their symbolic meaning was manipulated.

Clothes invade the body and brain, putting the wearer into a different psychological state, he said. He described his own experience from last Halloween (or maybe it should be called National Enclothed Cognition Day).

More studies are needed, he said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 4, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the journal in which the study on enclothed cognition was published. It is The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, not The Journal of Experimental Social Cognition. The article also described the findings of an earlier experiment incorrectly. In that experiment, people who held a hot drink in their hands rated others personally warmer; it is not the case that people were rated personally warmer if they held a hot drink.