I’ve written before about one of the best teachers I ever had, Sue Katzman (Finkelstein).   Sue is the reason I managed to graduate from my yeshiva at the top of my form and excel in high school, college, and beyond.  She arranged that she would be my teacher for 7^th, 8^th, and 9^th grades (English and History), there was no escaping her influence.

And, what an influence it was.  One of the key things she stressed with me was the need to dress appropriately.  She quoted a study that showed students who dressed well outperformed those who were dungarees (you know them as blue jeans) to class.  I never did find that reference, but one thing was for sure.  There was no way I was going to enter Ms. Katzman’s class without the appropriate attire.  She brooked no BS.

And, now, I know where the studies are.  They’ve just been finished.  OK.  Being the historian she was, I’m sure there were a study or more existing way back in the dark ages (the 1950s).  But, I never did find them.  (There was no Google or Bing and I had not learned of Current Contents until grad school.)

These new studies demonstrate that wearing a suit or blazer makes an employee more productive, a better negotiator, and a conference attendee.

Drs. Michael Kraus and Wendy Mendes of Yale (School of Management) published their article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology (Sartorial symbols of social class elicit class-consistent behavioral and physiological responses: A dyadic approach) a year ago.  They included 128 male subjects (various socioeconomic groups) in role-playing (mock negotiations over the sale of a factory- one that did not exist) situation.

The buyers of the factory were derived from one of three groups- the first wore business suits and dress shoes (upper class) ; the second came equipped with sweatpants, T shirts, and plastic sandals (lower class). The third group was neutral (they wore the clothes in which they arrived for the testing.)  The sellers in question were always neutrals- and no sellers were ever allowed to play the buyer in these negotiations.

For the negotiations, the “players” were informed of the fair market value for the hypothetical production facility, plus other information needed to place their opening bids and asking prices.  The “suits” didn’t yield any ground in the negotiations, maintaining their bids mighty close to their initial offers of $ 830K.   This was a dramatic difference from the sweatpant group that afforded bid prices of $ 2.8 million.  The neutrals were “in-between”, allowing their bids to creep up to $ 1.58 million.  Obviously, the changes among the participants were both internal and external.

The study that more matched the dictum provided by Miss Katzman can be found in the Social Pschological and Personality Science journal.  The researchers, Drs. Michael Slepian, Simon Gerber, Joshua Gold, and Abraham Turchick from Cal State Northridge (Slepian is now at Columbia) published their results as The Cognitive Consequences of Formal Clothing.

They effected a series of five tests that demonstrated that when we dress up, our thinking is more abstract and creative.  They employed 361 subjects who were requested to perform a variety of tasks.  In the course of these tests, they demonstrated that wearing the appropriate clothing has significant effects on our mental processing state.  88 of the 361 subjects were tested further- they demonstrated that the better clothed subjects understood the big picture more clearly; the lesser clothed individuals were more in tune with the mundane aspects of their tasks.

And, they say that clothes don’t make the man.

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