The quick way to higher intelligence?

When children (but also adults) encounter difficulties, they tend to think handicapping thoughts: “I’m so stupid,” “I can’t do it.” All of these negative thoughts consume cognitive capacity.

A study by French researchers shows:

A simple reframing can succeed in leveraging this negative mechanism and freeing up the cognitive capacity so that it is once again available for more important tasks.

Study:

Autin, F., & Croizet, J. C. (2012). Improving working memory efficiency by reframing metacognitive interpretation of task difficulty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(4), 610.

Can the clothes we wear influence our thinking and behaviour? For example, do we become more intelligent when we wear a doctor’s coat? Or do we become more helpful when we wear a nurse’s coat? Some recent studies on so-called “enclothed cognition” suggest that there might really be some truth to this phenomenon…But how robust are the effects really? Could the effects be replicated?

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Studies and books (only a small selection):

Adam, H., & Galinsky, A. D. (2012). Enclothed cognition. Journal of experimental social psychology, 48(4), 918-925.

Burck, E. (2019). Das manipulierte Gehirn: Psychologie der unbewussten Beeinflussung. BoD–Books on Demand.

Burns, D. M., Fox, E. L., Greenstein, M., Olbright, G., & Montgomery, D. (2019). An old task in new clothes: A preregistered direct replication attempt of enclothed cognition effects on Stroop performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 83, 150-156.

Jones, M. G., Lee, T., Chesnutt, K., Carrier, S., Ennes, M., Cayton, E., … & Huff, P. (2019). Enclothed cognition: putting lab coats to the test. International Journal of Science Education, 41(14), 1962-1976.

Kraus, M. W., & Mendes, W. B. (2014). Sartorial symbols of social class elicit class-consistent behavioral and physiological responses: A dyadic approach. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(6), 2330.

López-Pérez, B., Ambrona, T., Wilson, E. L., & Khalil, M. (2016). The effect of enclothed cognition on empathic responses and helping behavior. Social Psychology.

Mendoza, S. A., & Parks-Stamm, E. J. (2020). Embodying the police: the effects of enclothed cognition on shooting decisions. Psychological reports, 123(6), 2353-2371.

Zimbardo, P. G. (1969). The human choice: Individuation, reason, and order versus deindividuation, impulse, and chaos. In Nebraska symposium on motivation. University of Nebraska press.