Think
again before wearing that comfy old hoodie to an interview, even if the company
says it's OK.
A new study finds that if you had just a split
second to decide whether to hire me, you'd probably judge
me as not competent enough for the job because of
the shirt on my back.
That's because I don't tend to dress in a way that would make someone
think I have much money. And new research out of Princeton University and published in Nature Human Behaviour finds
that we determine people's competence in part from subtle economic cues tied to
their clothing.
The researchers ran nine studies in which
participants rated the perceived competence of people wearing different
clothing on their upper bodies. Those wearing clothes seen as
"richer" were rated as more competent than people
wearing similar clothes that appeared "poorer."
While this might not seem surprising, given
old clichés like "clothes make the man" or "dress for
success," it still crushes me a little bit.
I'm right on the cusp of being both a Gen-Xer
and a Millennial, and for decades now it's been a bit of a joke that I tend to
dress down. To this day, I still don't know how to tie a tie. When I was
younger, I would receive clip-on and zip-up ties as joke gifts. I swear to you,
I have pulled off wearing sweatpants as business attire in a shocking number of
contexts.
The truth is, when I was an awkward teenager,
I never stood a chance of dressing for success no matter how pricey the
threads, so I came to rebel against the whole concept. I also just hate the
idea of spending a lot for clothing, be it in time or money. At one point, I
dropped out of college and moved to Silicon Valley to join what seemed like a
revolution led by an army of disheveled, hoodie-wearing outcasts I could relate
to.
And, as it turns out, I've done pretty well
the past two decades without tying a tie or tucking in a shirt. Seems like an
awful lot of other folks of my generation and those younger than me have pulled
it off as well.
Then comes this study to ruin it all. It finds
that for an observer the link between how rich (or not) your clothes make you
look and how competent you appear is apparently tough to disentangle.
"To overcome a bias, one needs to not
only be aware of it but to have the time, attentional resources, and
motivation to counteract the bias," the researchers wrote. "In our
studies, we warned participants about the potential bias, presented them with
varying lengths of exposure, gave them additional information about the
targets, and offered financial incentives, all intended to alleviate the
effect. But none of these interventions were effective."
In other words, there was nothing the
researchers tried that seemed to take away the influence of clothing on people's
perceptions of competence. Even when cash was offered to people to match the
judgments of another group that rated the same faces without any indication of
the clothing, they still were biased by the clothes hanging around the
necks of those faces.
This begins to explain why I've been a
telecommuting independent contractor for over a decade now. My clothes haven't
factored into any interviews I've had for years now because few of my clients
ever get to see my thrift store wardrobe.
As it turns out, the researchers behind the
Princeton study see my situation as something employers could learn from,
because it takes the potential bias out of the equation.
"Just like teachers sometimes grade
blindly so as to avoid favoring some students, interviewers and employers may
want to take what measures they can, when they can, to evaluate people, say, on
paper so as to circumvent indefensible yet hard to avoid competency
judgments," study co-author and Princeton behavioral science
professor Eldar Shafir said in a release. "Academic
departments, for example, have long known that hiring without interviews can
yield better scholars. It's also an excellent argument for school
uniforms."
To anyone who thinks seriously about uniforms
as a means of dealing with this bias, I strongly suggest sweatpants and hoodies
as a comfortable way of leveling the playing field.
PUBLISHED
ON: DEC 10, 2019
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com
columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment