Professor Dress
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recognize the importance of their instructors’ attire, particularly at higher levels
of instruction and in disciplines where attire has traditionally been important:
MBA students, for example, report (as they are taught) that professional attire is
useful for impression management (Peluchette et al., 2006). Most of these
studies, however, have been based on surveys, and therefore assess what
respondents report to be important. Their reports may differ from their beliefs,
their beliefs may differ from reality, and, regardless, their perceptions are rarely
related to actual behaviors.
Even in terms of perceptions, there is ambiguity in the empirical evidence
on the consequences of any attire. For example, while white lab coats have long
been a symbol of physicians—one of the most historically lasting, and possibly
most sociologically persuasive instances of regulated attire—at least one study
found no significant difference in perceptions of physicians based on their attire
(Fischer et al., 2007). Another found that wearing a tie did not matter as long as
the physicians were dressed neatly (Dobson, 2003). In educational settings, the
evidence is even more divergent and ambiguous: While teachers wearing formal
attire enhances perceptions of their credibility and knowledge, it works against
other qualities such as approachability and fairness (Rollman 1980; Leathers,
1992; Lavin et al., 2009). The perceptions themselves are of course not the
intended outcomes of the attire, and whether credibility or approachability
creates a more learning-centered environment is not clear from either the data or
most of those who report it. There appears to be little, if any, research that has
measured what students actually do in relation to faculty attire, as opposed to
simply what they say they do.^
Recording Attires’ Outcomes
The data summarized here began as a pedagogical exercise and evolved into
an inadvertent experiment. For the first four weeks of lectures in an upperdivision course in Sociology research methods, I wore a tie on Tuesdays and did
not wear one on Thursdays, as the basis for a midterm examination question
assessing whether students understood hypotheses. The first time I did this, the
question asked for a prediction of what I would wear on a Tuesday. I repeated
the exercise the second time I taught the course, but altered the midterm
question to suggest rather vaguely that “student behavior differed” between the
two days. After grading that second instance of the examination, I realized that
student behavior might have differed—but that I didn’t know. I immediately
decided that in the next and future instances of the course, I would begin to
investigate whether the examination question was a complete lark or whether
there were behavioral differences—years before I considered the relevant
literature.
In the ensuing decade, I both continued and elaborated the process, teaching
a similar course eleven times, to 262 students (with an fW&vR6