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The Impact Of Wearing Formal Clothing On Cognitive Processing

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Article Analysis Assignment In their study, the authors endeavored to examine the impact of wearing formal clothing on cognitive processing. The authors want to explore a difference, if any, between the abstract thought processes of a participant wearing formal clothes. As for their hypothesis, they suspect that “wearing formal clothing induces more abstract cognitive processing.”(Slepian 1) According to the article, “events that are psychologically distant are conceived of relatively abstractly, while events that are psychologically near are conceived of relatively concretely.” In layman’s terms, the authors are suggesting that increases of social comfort encourages concrete thinking while less social comfort encourages abstract thinking. Therefore, because formal clothing creates social distance, the authors, in their respective opinion, have good reason to suppose that the bearing of formal clothing will increase abstract thinking. The researchers conducted five different studies, all of which used undergraduates as participants of the study. For the first study, the participants were sixty undergraduates and 78% were female. In the study, researchers studied the relationship between clothing and abstract processing, while accounting for the covariant, socioeconomic status. Participants were asked to rate the formality of their currently worn clothing in relation to their peers on a scale from -50 to +50. In addition, they were given a behavioral identification form in

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