Effects of Race, Gender, and Clothing Style on Stereotype Activation

The Effects of Race, Gender, and Clothing Style on Stereotype Activation For many years people have thought that the clothing one wears has a serious effect upon  how they are perceived.  Understanding how one’s outward appearance shapes the perceptions  others hold of them can be incredibly useful for people in all points of life, from interviewing for a  job to making a good impression on a date.  Various phrases and slang across the vernacular indicate that people are always judged to an extent on face value.  “You are what you wear” is just one phrase that shows how ingrained this logic is in the collective consciousness of society.  In a series of interviews with women, Guy and Banim (2000) discuss the importance of clothing on a woman’s sense of personal identity while still maintaining a sense of appropriateness in various circumstances.  Understanding how clothing plays a role in person perception has been a recent focus of psychological research, and can have implications for various social situations involving impression formation.

Probably the biggest area of impact that this research may influence is the business world. In recent years, research on clothing has focused on perceptions of professionalism and other work-related traits in a job interview setting.  This research has examined the crucial first impressions that clothing may cause during a job interview which, practically, could be the difference between landing a job and another job search.  Willis and Todorov (2006) investigated the importance of first impressions in their study. Results indicated that first impressions crafted in one-tenth of a second correlate strongly with perceptions made in the absence of time constraints; furthermore, they found that increasing the time to analyze the subject to half of a second did not significantly change the correlation of the variables under examination (including attractiveness, competence, and trustworthiness).  In fact, the only thing that continued to increase without time constraints was the confidence that their perceptions were right at the beginning.  Among professional workers from various fields, a study found that 81% rated appearance of a professional employee as “very important” to the evaluation of the product or service to potential customers or clients (Easterling, Leslie, & Jones, 1992).  Thus, first impressions and appearance are important regardless of whether they are accurate or predict work performance. Gender Stereotypes and the Workplace Social psychologists agree that social perceivers automatically categorize people into visually perceptible social groups, namely race, gender, and age (Blair et. al., 2002). Research has shown that social categorization, or the grouping of people into mental categories, is strongly linked to the activation of stereotypes; that is, stereotypes are activated simply by perceiving physical attributes of social groups (Blair et al., 2002).  Furthermore, Devine (1989) showed that people do not have to be high in prejudice against a particular group to have stereotypes automatically activated about the group.  Rather, all social perceivers, regardless of individual levels of prejudice, automatically activate learned stereotypes as a result of social categorization.  As reviewed in the study by Blair et al., research has demonstrated that gender is one of the  categories that captures the attention of social perceivers (Zarate & Smith, 1990). Studies have shown that categorizing someone by gender automatically activates gender stereotypes that range from domains of intelligence, such as the alleged gap between math and verbal skills (Nguyen & Ryan, 2008), to underlying personality differences.  Most gender stereotypes indicate that women and men are separated into different trait domains, with men considered to have more “competent” values such as competitiveness, independence, and ambitiousness, whereas women fall into the “warmth and expressiveness cluster” that includes gentleness, interest in art, and sensitivity to emotions (Broverman et al., 1972).  Various studies have shown that there are gender differences in self-evaluations, with women rating themselves higher on average on agreeableness and the emotional stability/neuroticism scale than men (Costa et al., 2001; Goodwin & Gotlib 2004).  Additionally, these findings have been shown to replicate across cultures (McCrae et al., 2005). Despite their integration into the workplace, recent research shows that perceivers still have a negative perception of women in the workplace. For example, men tend to be judged as being significantly more associated with “business” words such as ambition, leadership ability, and competitiveness than women (Prentice &Carranza, 2002).  While men are often seen as powerful in a business setting, Cuddy et al. (2004) showed that women in the workplace are more likely to be perceived as less competent than men, especially when they reported having children. In this study, however, women were rated as “warmer” when they had children, although this is not necessarily a desirable trait in the business world. This shows that even when women are able to overcome the negative perception of their competence in the workplace they pay a penalty for that respect in another domain, whereas men do not have this difficulty. Recent studies have examined how gender may interact with clothing style in the workplace. Glick et al. (2005) found that women who dressed in an attractive manner, or “sexy,” at work were not thought of as less competent if they occupied a low prestige job such as a secretary, but if they were in a more powerful job such as in management then dressing in an attractive manner damaged their perceived competence.  Even when women are considered to be competent, they receive negative evaluations because of that competence, for literature indicates that women are often perceived as either “warm” or “competent,” but not both (Cuddy et al., 2004).  Another study investigated how clothing style and gender affected the perceptions of therapists; results indicated that formal clothing was viewed more favorably than casual clothing and that, overall, females were viewed more favorably than males (Dacy & Brodsky, 1992).