Devin Burns
Psychologist and first author of the 2019 preregistered direct replication of the lab coat attention effect.
Who they are
Burns is listed at Missouri University of Science and Technology on that university's repository. With four colleagues he repeated the original enclothed cognition test of attention, which had not been replicated in print before, in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2019. The study was preregistered and used the same colour-word task as the 2012 experiment.
Wearing a lab coat made no detectable difference. The team concluded that an effect of that kind, if it exists, is too small for the original design to have detected reliably. Their study detected other effects as small as seven thousandths of a second, which makes weak equipment or technique an unlikely explanation for the result.
Key papers
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.
Key ideas
See Enclothed Cognition.
Sources
- Burns and colleagues (2019), abstract read, 13 October 2026. Affiliation as listed on the Missouri University of Science and Technology repository, read 13 October 2026.