When you got up this morning, how did you want the world to see you? Did you want to be taken seriously or did you want people to know you were tired. What would you think if Andrew came to class in baggy sweat pants and a sweatshirt? How much would you think he valued his job? Fashion is important. I’m not talking about collecting designer items or spending thousands of dollars on a single accessory, but the way you dress is important.

In the Does Prayer Heal lesson, we learned that though prayer doesn’t heel, though it does helps shorten the duration of a patients visit. This is because the patients believed in themselves and wanted to get better. Fashion has that power. It has the ability to make someone feel so confident and in control of themselves that it them to mentally be the best version of themselves. Through a study run by researchers at Columbia University and California State University, Northridge, it was discovered that formal clothing improves people’s cognitive thinking. The The study  published in Social Psychological & Personality Science asked college students to dress in clothing they would normally wear to class or business formal clothing. They then took a cognitive thinking test. “Across a series of experiments, those wearing the more formal outfits exhibited broader, more holistic thinking.” (The Huffington Post). This could seem absolutely crazy to some. How could your clothing change the way your mind works? A co-author of the article, Michael Slepian, described how “Formal clothing made people feel more powerful, which in turn made them more likely to adopt high-level, abstract thinking,” while they also also “…improve your mood if you feel good in the clothing and think it looks good.”

Another sStudy conducted by professors at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University continues this theory that ones outfit effects their cognitive thinking. The study gave two groups of participants different white coats. One group was given white doctor’s coats to wear, while the other was given white artists’ coats. They were both then asked to perform a cognitive test called a strobe test. A flash card had a word written in a color, and par
icipants had to say the color of the word rather than the word itself. The participants in the lab coats had better results than those in the artist coats. Galinsky, one of the researchers, concluded from this study that  “their findings show that it’s not just the experience of wearing the clothes, but the symbolic meaning they hold for the people”. Basically, putting on an outfit that society claims to be “cute” will not instantaneously make you feel better. You have to wear clothing that makes YOU feel good and empowered. In this example, the lab coats made the participants feel smarter. I remember the episode of Greys Anatomy when Meredith received her doctors coat and it made her feel like a “real” doctor.

So what does this mean for us as students? College students are notorious for showing up to class in the most comfortable clothes they own, aka pajamas. Yet it has been proven through these two studies that dressing “up” will make you perform better mentally. So try it next time you have class. Put on an outfit that makes you feel great about yourself and see how you perform that day academically!