Waking up for an 8 a.m. exam can seem harder than the actual exam. It probably feels like the perfect time to roll out of bed, pull on some sweats and furry boots, tie your hair into a messy bun, and hope that the world ignores your half-smudged mascara. Not so fast, though—dressing up for that exam actually could help you do better on it, according to Racked.
According to a study from California State University, wearing more formal clothes can improve your performance on certain exams. Nautilus reported that this all started when CSU psychologist Abraham M. Rutchick conducted an experiment on “how nonconscious processes function in everyday life”—So how things like getting dressed in the morning, which you may not even think about that much, could impact the way you think, and therefore, your grades.
Rutchick asked 60 undergrads rate how formally they thought they dressed that day, then take a ten-question quiz that rated how “abstract” the student was thinking. On it, there were questions like “Voting is best described as…” with two answer choices, one abstract and one concrete. For the voting question, “Influencing the election” was the abstract answer, and “marking a ballot” was the concrete answer. Even after being asked to change halfway through the testing, students who were dressed more formally chose the more abstract answers.
Abstract thinking is awesome for tests that require analytical, broad thinking, like English or Poli Sci. However, abstract answers don’t work for everything. Rutchick told Nautilus that for situations that require detail-oriented tasks with concrete answers, like in engineering, dressing down could actually help you more.
The mantra here is similar to “dressing for the job you want”—except you should dress for the test that you’re taking. Taking a hard English exam? You’ll need to think outside the box about big ideas, so try wearing a that Olivia Pope suit you have hiding in your closet. But if you’re heading to a Stats midterm, maybe opt for leggings (Yes please).