Canadian scientists have shown that wearing a police uniform affects a person's assessment of the social status of others. The results of the work were published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
It is known that clothing strongly influences what personality traits observers attribute to a person. Past work has shown that appearance plays an even greater role in this context than physical attractiveness. An example of this influence is the police uniform: for example, people tend to perceive the person in it as competent, intelligent and responsive.
Meanwhile, a number of studies indicate that clothing can affect a person's self-perception. For example, in the Stanford experiment, students wearing guard uniforms were more likely to exhibit authoritarian behavior, and "prisoners" behaved like "victims." To find out how police uniforms are related to perception, scientists at McMaster University conducted three experiments.
In the first, 28 students were divided into two groups, each wearing one of the uniforms: a policeman or an auto mechanic. Then the participants watched the stimuli on the monitor - a circle or a square - and had to press the corresponding button ("." Or "x") as quickly as possible. At the same time, images of men in a formal suit or in a hoodie appeared on the screen.
Example of uniforms and reaction times for different clothes and race
Ciro Civile et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 2017
The pictures featured both black and white men. The purpose of the experiment was to determine how much delay each of the photographs would lead to "police" and "auto mechanics". The results showed that the images from the hoodie were more distracting to "cops" than "auto mechanics". Moreover, the former quickly ignored men in business suits, but performed the task more accurately.
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In the second experiment, 28 other students performed a similar task in uniform, but instead of circles and squares, dots were used as stimuli. As in the first series of tests, participants were distracted by images of people in hoodies and business suits, black and white men. According to the analysis, "cops" stayed longer on "suspiciously" dressed people than "auto mechanics".
28 students participated in the third experiment, but this time some of them were wearing police uniforms, while others performed both tests in casual clothes. Moreover, the control group had a folded police uniform next to the screen. The result of this series was controversial: the "cops" were more distracted by the hoodies, and the "citizens" by the business suits.
It is noteworthy that the speed of completing tasks was not related to race: in all cases, the delay was caused by the clothes of the people in the pictures. According to the authors, this indicates a stereotype of perception: a hoodie is associated with a low social status, and when the observer puts on a police uniform, the stereotype is reinforced. Such a pattern could threaten the safety of citizens, the authors say.
Denis Strigun