Applied Linguistics at KMUTT

In his latest ajarn.com blog, Steve writes:

"What we wear even influences our own behaviour. In 2012, researchers divided people into three groups for an experiment on sustained attention. Participants in one group were given a doctor's (white) coat to wear, the second were told the exact same garment was a painter's coat and were asked to wear it, and the third group just saw the coat hanging in the room. Those wearing the doctor's coat were found to have higher levels of attention. Simply wearing the lab coat improved the participants' performance!"

Does the clothes you wear influence your performance in the PhD classroom? Should we get you to all wear white lab coats?!? How do the clothes you wear to class affect your performance in lessons?

Personally, I don't think the clothes we wear would affect our performance in the PhD classroom since we all know who the teacher is and who our classmates are. However, I still think it is interesting to try replicate this study by having us wearing something different but this time ,also with different classmates or teachers. If I could suggest anyone to take part in the study, I would suggest Harris to be the first subject because he seems to have different personalities depending on his outfit.

I definitely feel that when I'm teaching, I should look like a teacher, and I grew up in a society where uniforms were the norm for students in schools. However, when I was studying my PhD, I didn't know how to dress when I came in. What does a PhD student 'look like' in terms of dress. In retrospect, though, it was nice to come in feeling casually dressed.

On another note, though, I wonder if color has any effect on how we behave. In the Thai schools I work with, teachers have to wear a different color each day of the week. Are any colors more conducive to concentration? I remember reading once somewhere that green was more conducing to learning because it's soothing on the eyes (hence the prevalence of green blackboards at one stage), but I also remember something about painting classrooms yellow because it stimulates learning. Do you think we teach and learn better with black and white uniforms on?