What Do Clothes Say About You? Judging One’s Self-Esteem Based on Style of Dress
Start Date
April 2020
End Date
April 2020
Major Field of Study
Psychology
Student Type
Undergraduate
Faculty Mentor(s)
William Phillips, PhD
Presentation Format
Poster Presentation
Abstract/Description
Clothing plays a significant role in how people make judgments of others and is a significant element in appearance. Researchers examined if participants were willing to participate in activities with men and women wearing athletic, intellectual, or sexually suggestive shirts, through photographs. The result showed that people would likely engage with individuals in athletic and intellectual shirts and less likely to interact with women in sexually suggestive shirts. The concept supported this idea that people have various perceptions of others through the clothing they are wearing, leading to changing one’s behavioral objective. The present study will explore how people judge one’s self-esteem based on their clothing. Participants will be asked to judge and rate the photographs. The photographs consist of a male wearing business casual attire, a male wearing gym clothes, a woman wearing business casual attire, and a woman wearing gym clothes. It is hypothesized that 1) upperclassmen will rate the self-esteem of the photographs with gym attire more positively while lowerclassmen will rate the self-esteem of the photographs with business casual more positively, 2) the photographs of subjects in business casual attire will be seen as more confident than those in gym attire, 3) lowerclassmen will judge the class standings of the person in the photographs in gym attire to be an upperclassman while upperclassmen will judge the class standings of the person in the photographs in business casual attire to be a lowerclassmen.
What Do Clothes Say About You? Judging One’s Self-Esteem Based on Style of Dress
Clothing plays a significant role in how people make judgments of others and is a significant element in appearance. Researchers examined if participants were willing to participate in activities with men and women wearing athletic, intellectual, or sexually suggestive shirts, through photographs. The result showed that people would likely engage with individuals in athletic and intellectual shirts and less likely to interact with women in sexually suggestive shirts. The concept supported this idea that people have various perceptions of others through the clothing they are wearing, leading to changing one’s behavioral objective. The present study will explore how people judge one’s self-esteem based on their clothing. Participants will be asked to judge and rate the photographs. The photographs consist of a male wearing business casual attire, a male wearing gym clothes, a woman wearing business casual attire, and a woman wearing gym clothes. It is hypothesized that 1) upperclassmen will rate the self-esteem of the photographs with gym attire more positively while lowerclassmen will rate the self-esteem of the photographs with business casual more positively, 2) the photographs of subjects in business casual attire will be seen as more confident than those in gym attire, 3) lowerclassmen will judge the class standings of the person in the photographs in gym attire to be an upperclassman while upperclassmen will judge the class standings of the person in the photographs in business casual attire to be a lowerclassmen.
Comments
This presentation was accepted for the Scholarly and Creative Works Conference at Dominican University of California. The Conference was canceled due to the Covid-19 Pandemic