Enclothed Cognition

Enclothed Cognition

Enclothed cognition is the proposal that clothes affect the wearer's own thinking, through what they symbolise and the physical experience of wearing them. Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky named it in 2012 in a lab coat study. A 2019 preregistered replication of the first test found no effect, and a 2023 analysis judged later studies more trustworthy than early ones.

What it is

Adam and Galinsky defined it, in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, as "the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer's psychological processes", depending on both the symbolic meaning of the clothes and the experience of wearing them. A pretest linked the lab coat with attentiveness and carefulness. In their first experiment, wearing a lab coat improved selective attention compared with not wearing one. In the next two, a coat described as a doctor's coat improved sustained attention compared with the same coat described as a painter's coat, and compared with seeing or identifying with a doctor's coat.

Related work points the same way. Bettina Hannover and Ulrich Kühnen linked formal dress to formal self-descriptions in 2002, and Michael Slepian and colleagues linked formal clothing to more abstract thinking in 2015.

In 2023 C. Blaine Horton, with Adam and Galinsky as co-authors, analysed 105 effects from 40 studies in 24 articles, with 3,789 participants. They raised concerns about the replicability of early studies, found evidential value in those published after 2015.

In effect

For a consumer, the idea is that dressing for a role might change how one thinks while doing it. The best-known result, the attention gain from a doctor's coat, did not appear when it was tested directly.

What it does not say

Devin Burns and colleagues ran the first published replication of the lab coat attention test in 2019, preregistered and using the same colour-word task. Wearing the coat made no detectable difference. They concluded that an effect of that kind, if it exists, is too small for the original design to have detected reliably, and since their study picked up other effects as small as seven thousandths of a second, weak equipment or technique is an unlikely explanation.

Axel Burger and Herbert Bless reported two preregistered studies in 2017: pooled data from the first supported a link between formal clothing and abstract thinking, and the second found no link.

Sources

  1. Adam, H., & Galinsky, A. D. (2012). "Enclothed cognition." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(4), 918-925. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2012.02.008.
  2. Hannover, B., & Kühnen, U. (2002). "'The clothing makes the self' via knowledge activation." Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 32(12), 2513-2525. doi:10.1111/j.1559-1816.2002.tb02754.x.
  3. Slepian, M. L., Ferber, S. N., Gold, J. M., & Rutchick, A. M. (2015). "The cognitive consequences of formal clothing." Social Psychological and Personality Science, 6(6), 661-668. doi:10.1177/1948550615579462.
  4. Horton, C. B., Adam, H., & Galinsky, A. D. (2025). "Evaluating the evidence for enclothed cognition: z-curve and meta-analyses." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 51(2), 203-221. Published online 2023. doi:10.1177/01461672231182478.
  5. Burns, D. M., Fox, E. L., Greenstein, M., Olbricht, G. R., & Montgomery, D. (2019). "An old task in new clothes: a preregistered direct replication attempt of enclothed cognition effects on Stroop performance." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 83, 150-156. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2018.10.001.
  6. Burger, A. M., & Bless, H. (2017). "Cognitive consequences of formal clothing: the effects of clothing versus thinking of clothing." Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology, 2(2-3), 228-252. doi:10.1080/23743603.2017.1396185.