It’s often said that clothes maketh the man, and it’s unquestionable that our appearance does influence how others perceive us.  The scale of this influence was revealed by a recent study from Princeton University, which showed how our clothing can influence the perceptions about our ability in a matter of milliseconds.

What’s more, once these judgments are made, they’re incredibly hard to shift.  These findings emerged across nine experiments, with volunteers asked to rate the competence of various people, each of whom was wearing different kinds of upper-body clothing in their photo.  The results showed that clothing that signified wealth correlated with higher competence ratings for that person.

“Poverty is a place rife with challenges. Instead of respect for the struggle, people living in poverty face a persistent disregard and disrespect by the rest of society,” the authors say. “We found that such disrespect — clearly unfounded, since in these studies the identical face was seen as less competent when it appeared with poorer clothing — can have its beginnings in the first tenth of a second of an encounter.”

Wealth inequality

It’s clear that wealth inequality has risen in recent decades, but also that people are intensely sensitive to how rich other people appear to be.  The research reminds us that we often correlate wealth with other meaningful traits, such as competence, and that these biases are very difficult to overcome.

The findings emerged after the volunteers were presented with images of around 50 faces.  Each of the people in the photos were dressed in clothes that had been rated as showing various degrees of wealth or poverty.  It should be noted that the clothes weren’t designed to show extreme poverty, but rather minor differences.

To test the speed of decision making, the volunteers were shown each image for different lengths of time, ranging from around 1 second down to around 130 milliseconds, which the researchers explain is just about enough time to comprehend that you’d actually seen a human face.  Interestingly, the judgments remained stable across each of the timeframes.

Over the course of the study, the experiments were subtly tweaked to test the robustness of the findings.  For instance, in one, traditional office wear was replaced by more informal clothing, whereas in a second experiment volunteers were explicitly informed that there was no relationship between clothes and competence.  Indeed, some experiments gave explicit information about each individual, including their profession, and financial incentives were provided to encourage considered thought to the task.

Whatever the tweaks made by the researchers however, the results remained the same.  People in smarter clothing were consistently regarded as more competent, and these judgments were made almost instantaneously, even when people were informed that there was no link between clothes and competence.

This connection between perceived economic status and competency endured even when direct information about one’s profession and income were provided.

“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 say. “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.”