Enclothed cognition or: Casual Friday can be bad for you

One of the things that still irritate me is the concept of casual Friday. First, it is very much an American invention. I grew up in Germany and lived for 21 years in Switzerland, two societies that are more formal than the UK or the US. Even worse, for most of my career, I worked in wealth management, which is more formal than investment banking and brokerage. 

Today, I have ditched the tie on most days even though it still irritates me to meet clients wearing a suit but no tie. But what I really will never ever comply with is casual Friday. It will be a cold day in hell before I show up in the office on a Friday wearing jeans and a shirt. And one reason for that is simply that my job involves a lot of analytical and abstract analysis and that gets worse if you wear casual clothing.

Wait what? I hear you say. Yes, there is an effect called enclothed cognition first described by Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky in 2012. They asked a couple of students to perform an attention test. The trick about the test was that sometimes they had to perform the test in casual clothing, sometimes in a lab coat that was described to them as a doctor’s coat, and sometimes in a lab coat that was described to them as a painter’s coat. We all associate doctors with increased conscientiousness and greater attention to detail, so making people wear a lab coat described as a doctor’s coat forced them to take on the role of a doctor. As a result, the students that wore a doctor’s coat were better at the attention test and made fewer mistakes than students that were dressed casually. They literally paid more attention to the attention test because the clothes they wore made them act more conscientious. By the way, just putting a lab coat into the room without making the students wear it did not increase performance, and making students wear the lab coat but telling them it was a painter’s coat didn’t improve performance either. People had to be put into the position of a doctor by wearing what they believed to be a doctor’s coat to act differently.

Lab coats are one thing but wearing a suit or other formal clothing may be a different thing altogether, but that is not true. A different set of experiments showed that students who wore clothes that they ‘would wear at a job interview’ performed better at analytical tasks and abstract association tasks. Formal clothing puts you into a different mindset that is more professional and associated with different behaviour. And this leads to different behaviour in practice. Because I am a research analyst and professional investor, my job is full of data analysis tasks and abstract reasoning and these are exactly the tasks that get easier if you wear formal clothing. On the other hand, casual clothing is typically perceived as more relaxed and approachable, so if you have a job in sales a more casual outfit may be more advantageous for you because it reduces the social distance between you and your customer.

But I for one, will stick to formal clothing, and not wearing a tie is about as much of a compromise I will ever make in the office. And I can do that because I can compensate for the lack of formality of going tie-less by wearing more formal clothing that isn’t typically noticed by other people as more formal.