Children view people wearing formal clothing as a better source of information, according to new study that has some implications for educators.
The study, conducted by Kyla P. McDonald and Lili Ma of Ryerson University in Canada, was published in PLOS One this month.
“Children rely heavily on what they are told by others to learn about the world, as knowledge about many domains is not accessible to their direct senses or experiences,” McDonald and Ma wrote said. “A great deal of research has demonstrated that when learning new information, young children consider a range of factors and display selective trust in one source over another.”
One of those factors appears to be what the source of information is wearing.
In an experiment with 32 children, the researchers had 4- and 6-year-olds view a series of photos of two women. One was dressed casually while the other was dressed formally. The researcher found the children were more likely to identify the formally dressed woman as more knowledgeable than the casually dressed one.
During a second experiment with 66 other children, the researchers found that 4- and 6-year-olds were also more likely to ask a formally dressed individual about new objects and animals.
McDonald and Ma said instructors generally assume that their physical appearance does not impact students’ learning. But this study suggests otherwise.
“If children attribute greater knowledge to and prefer to learn from formally dressed individuals, through increased immediacy, they might actually learn more effectively from formally rather than casually dressed instructors,” the researchers said.
“This may be due to several factors, including a greater motivation to learn from, more sustained attention to, and an increased faith in the information presented by formally dressed instructors. As such, instructor dress may play an important role in supporting young children’s learning in the classroom,” McDonald and Ma wrote.
“To address this possibility, future work can directly compare formally dressed instructors with casually dressed ones and examine whether young students attribute greater general knowledge to the former and prefer to learn from them in classroom settings.”
