Institute for Theory and Practice of Communication, Berlin University of the Arts, Berlin, Germany.
Department of Social, Environmental, and Economic Psychology, University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, Landau, Germany.
Br J Soc Psychol. 2024 Apr;63(2):1003-1035. doi: 10.1111/bjso.12700. Epub 2023 Nov 27.
Clothing behaviour remains an understudied research area within social psychology. Through the present research, we aim to anchor attire as an empirical research subject by investigating the psychological properties of one of its functionalities, namely, to provide protection. We argue that attire's undisputed role in shielding humans from environmental hazards may extend to the psychological level and protect them from the incorporeal consequences of existential threats symbolically. In this Registered Report, a mixed-methods approach links an ecologically valid field study of self-presentation in social media posts during Russia's war on Ukraine (Study 1; N = 248) with supraliminal priming of mortality salience in an online experiment (Study 2; N = 248). Across both studies, we expect that mortality concerns let people accentuate the physically protective attributes of clothing (e.g. more layers of clothing) and resort to more in-group prototypical dress styles (i.e. more gender-stereotypical). Findings show that people adjust their clothing preferences in response to existential threats, favouring in-group prototypical clothing (more gender-typical for both women and men in Study 1) and physically protective attire (higher in women and lower in men in Study 2) during high (vs. low) levels of existential threat. By positioning clothing as a research area within social psychology, our goal is to stimulate a wave of research on its profound role for humankind. Furthermore, we provide a dynamic and robust methodological approach to researching terror management theory.
服装行为仍然是社会心理学中一个研究不足的领域。通过本研究，我们旨在将服装作为一个实证研究课题，通过研究其功能之一的心理属性来实现这一目标，即提供保护。我们认为，服装在保护人类免受环境危害方面的无可争议的作用可能会延伸到心理层面，保护他们免受象征性存在威胁的无形后果的影响。在本注册报告中，一种混合方法将对社交媒体帖子中自我呈现的生态有效性实地研究（研究 1；N=248）与在线实验中对死亡凸显的超阈刺激（研究 2；N=248）联系起来。在这两项研究中，我们预计死亡担忧会让人们强调服装的物理保护属性（例如，穿更多层衣服），并倾向于更具内群体原型的着装风格（即更具性别刻板印象）。研究结果表明，人们会根据存在威胁来调整服装偏好，在存在威胁较高（而非较低）时，更喜欢内群体原型服装（研究 1 中女性和男性都更具性别典型性）和具有物理保护作用的服装（女性的服装更多，男性的服装更少）。通过将服装定位为社会心理学中的一个研究领域，我们的目标是激发一波关于服装对人类深远影响的研究。此外，我们提供了一种动态而强大的研究恐怖管理理论的方法。
