It’s college and students are up sometimes all night long cramming for a test, which means fashion, most of the time, goes out the window. Think of the last time you actually got nicely dressed for class. Or do you rock the workout clothes and hat. With the wintertime coming the laziness and lack of effort put into clothing just gets worse. Would you be willing to change that if convinced it could actually benefit you to put in the extra time and effort? Does dressing nicely  truly make you feel better about yourself, and in turn helps you to succeed and conquer the stress.

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An article published in the Huffington Post sites a study that was conducted by researcher at Colombia University and California State University regarding dressing better and how it can result in “more abstract cognitive processing” (Click here for full article). They tested this theory among kids around college age, and gave them tests to determine their cognitive thinking process already. The conclusion, from Slepian, states that “Formal clothing made people feel more powerful, which in turn made them more likely to adopt high-level, abstract thinking” and “formal clothing might improve your mood if you feel good in the clothing and think it looks good”. So, the better you dress the more official and powerful you feel. Power can drive success so it can be said if power and success were correlated that the higher power you feel you have or do have the higher level of success you can achieve. Fancy business clothes make those new to the business world feel like they belong, and when you feel like you belong you feel better about yourself as a whole.

Sticking with the idea of belonging the Washington Post released an article summarizing a study in which the concept of dressing the part helps with your performance in a certain area. The case that was cited here was from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. In short, they gave research subjects the Stroop Test, and made some where white coats, to resemble lab coats, and some were told to wear actual lab coats. The conclusion being that those in the white coats, who identified them as lab coats, did better than those in the actual lab coats (get to full article with study here). This goes to show that when people think they look the part and feel like they belong that their performance enhances.

One way to create an experiment for this concept regarding college students is find the typical outfit a student would wear to class on any given day. Have a random set of students wear something similar to that, and the other half totally differ. If the ones who are wearing clothing that seems more like they belong, they probably had a boost in self-esteem, and may be doing better by feeling that they belong. Then again correlation need not equal causation, so many studies and experiments would have to be done in order refuse to reject the alternative hypothesis that how you dress actually does effect how you act or feel. This would mean rejecting the null hypothesis saying that there is no affect at all.

Personally, I feel that when you put some effort and planning into your outfit, hair, and makeup it makes you feel better about yourself. But, I would rather prefer, as most people dressing for success and power, and to feel like you belong.