A recent article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology by Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky suggests that items of clothing can have an impact on the wearer’s cognitive performance. (See summary.) They offer the term “enclothed cognition” to describe the effects, which in their study seem to result from a combination of the symbolic associations with particular clothing and the actual wearing of the item.

Study participants were asked to perform a Stroop test, which measures the reaction time to tasks requiring attention (identifying colors where the display color doesn’t match the word — for example, the word “green” displayed in blue). Students who took the test while wearing a white coat lab coat performed significantly better than those not wearing the coats. Participants who took the test while wearing the same coat, but who were told it was a painter’s coat did not show…

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