How Fashion Affects Your Brain _ ELLE

We all know about how clothes affect us in ways we want , we have clothes that make us feel more powerful , a little sexy , whatever it may be .

But what we wondered is how do clothes affect you in ways you cannot see .

Hi , I'm Hanna Rosin .

I'm Alix Spiegel and I'm Lulu Miller .

And we are in the , we went and we talked to these scientists who had looked in very , very careful ways at the things that clothes do to us , the way that they affect us that we are not aware of .

This is our scientist man .

His name is Adam Galinsky and he is a professor at Columbia Business School .

And he first got interested in all this .

Do clothes affect the way that people think and behave because of the Simpsons .

In this episode , they required Bart and Lisa all the kids to wear these gray uniforms and their behavior became very subdued .

These uniforms are a Godsend horseplay is down 40% youthful exuberance has been cut in half .

His spirits are at an all time low and he thought , wait , could there be anything to that ?

How does the clothes we wear affect our basic psychological processes and the way that we behave in the world specifically , he wondered if wearing a doctor's white coat could make you do better on a really complicated attention task , which is why a couple months ago , Elise Hanna and I grabbed a bunch of invisibilia listeners .

There you go , dragged them into quiet rooms at N PR and made half of them put on doctors white coats .

We were trying as best we could to replicate Adam's experiment .

The Stroop task , you have to say the color of the text that the word is written in .

Sorry , I just need to make sure I have this , the color that the word is written in .

So not what the words say brown , but it's red .

I say red .

OK .

OK .

OK .

So we gave everyone the same attention test that Adam gave them .

What are you about this horrible little thing where you're shown the names of different colors printed in various color inks , purple , red , green , yellow , yellow , purple , black , red , green , yellow , purple , yellow , purple , black .

What Adam and his team found was that the people in white coats like this guy here , green blue did way better , way better than the people in street clothes .

The people wearing the lab coat made about half as many the errors suggesting that they were definitely paying more attention .

I find that kind of amazing , like half as many errors .

I really want to know how that works .

I mean , why would it be true ?

Well , Adam wondered too .

Was it the fabric itself ?

Maybe there was something about having a little weight on your shoulders that gets you to focus better .

So he tested again .

But this time we described it as a painter's coat , same exact coat .

But he told people it's a , it's a painter's coat .

It's a painter's white coat .

Are you supposed to be filming me doing this ?

And purple , black red , it had barely any effect at all .

So , and what we found is that it's not just the material of the clothes themselves .

What the key key aspect is is that symbolic association with it .

While the doctor's coat symbolized to people attention focus .

I don't think we wear painter's coats in England isn't a painter's coat .

One of her painting out free creative crazy nuts doesn't really help much on an attention task .

That's right .

And the final thing Adam found is that if the coat was just sitting next to you , you don't get the effect .

There's something about putting on the coat .

Do you mind putting it on ?

Not at all and feeling it and being that person which Adam believes makes those beliefs contained in that piece of clothing carry over into you by putting on the clothing .

It essentially becomes who you are .

It's a little bit about a momentary shift in identity .

He has dubbed this effect and clothe cognition in clothed cognition .

The idea that there is a kind of magic to cloth .

It can carry moods and abilities that exist outside of you into your bloodstream , your brain and change you in quiet but measurable ways .

At least temporarily .

Thanks for watching our combined effort with L A little video of Simo .

Simo .

Science and emotion makes Simo .

Simo .

I know that direction .

Yeah .