Putting on a suit doesn’t just change how you look, it can change the way you perceive the world and make you think more broadly, a new US study suggests. So it turns out that Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother may have been right about the power of formal wear all along.
After testing people’s thought patterns in relation to the formality of their attire, researchers found that suit-wearers felt more powerful, and this encouraged them to think about the big picture rather than getting hung up on the details. Or in psychology terms, donning a suit encouraged ‘abstract processing’ rather than ‘concrete processing’.
Article Written by: Fiona MacDonald on May 4, 2015