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Nn picture sets modeling clothed girls4/27/2024 ![]() Of course, overall impressions emerge from dress alongside numerous other factors such as emotion expression, dynamic movement, body, surrounding context, and perceivers’ beliefs and motivations. If psychologists’ goal is to form theories of person perception that explain and predict real-world judgments, then it is important to begin studying impressions of more realistic and complex stimuli. However, people in the wild regularly perceive faces in a fully embodied state-that is, with an entire outfit and body unavoidably integrated into the categorization and evaluation process. The role of faces in person perception has been studied for decades ( Bruce & Young, 1986 Ekman & Friesen, 1971 Rhodes, 2006 Secord & Bevan, 1956 Todorov et al., 2015), with many of the most prominent theories and models of person perception ( Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008 Vernon et al., 2014 Zebrowitz et al., 2003) founded on the study of faces-almost always disembodied faces absent body or clothing for purposes of experimental control. This lack of attention contrasts sharply with heavily-researched factors involved in person perception, such as facial appearance. ![]() Here, we review existing literature, propose a working model to integrate dress with the broader impression formation literature, and identify four important ways in which dress impacts person perception.ĭespite lay consensus that dress is important for first impressions, recent reviews of social categorization and evaluation processes ( Bacev-Giles, & Haji, 2017 Kang & Bodenhausen, 2015 Pauker et al., 2018 Rule & Sutherland, 2017) have little to say about the impact of dress on these processes. This oversight raises questions regarding the validity of person perception models that do not incorporate target dress. ![]() Though most would agree that dress substantially influences perceptions and outcomes, this topic has received relatively little attention in social psychology. One outfit changes others’ impressions of Cinderella, and she lives happily ever after. At its core, this scene is about the transformative power of dress. ![]() She is now fit for the royal ball: Those in attendance greet her with awe rather than the disdain she would have faced arriving in her old, threadbare clothes. In one of Cinderella’s most iconic scenes, the Fairy Godmother transforms Cinderella’s clothing from rags into a beautiful ballgown. Finally, we identify and offer solutions to the theoretical and methodological challenges accompanying the psychological study of dress. For each of these, we review relevant work in social cognition, integrate this work with existing dress research, and propose future directions. Then, we identify four types of inferences for which perceivers rely on target dress: social categories, cognitive states, status, and aesthetics. We propose a working model of person perception that incorporates target dress alongside target face, target body, context, and perceiver characteristics. We discuss three reasons for this minimal attention to dress in person perception: high theoretical complexity, incompatibility with traditional methodology, and underappreciation by the groups who have historically guided research in person perception. However, target dress is notably absent from current theories and models of person perception. Clothing, hairstyle, makeup, and accessories influence first impressions.
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