On the association between Enclothed cognition and Entrainment - Rhythmic Synchronization of Behavior

Today I had an interesting encounter with a person in the ski track that show how roles influence our willingness to communicate. Initially, we had great entrainment. We started to talk about nutrition, and realized that we where former colleagues. Then entrainment went away. This can be explained by Enclothed cognition, that we as a species act differently depending on the role we have or take. 5 pages

Please support the blog via Swish (Sweden) or MobilePay (Finland).

Today I had an interesting encounter with a person in the ski track that show how roles influence our willingness to communicate. We were both doing cross country skiing. First, I passed her, and then, when I was admiring the hazy and sunny morning with another person, she joined our admiration (see picture below).


A few minutes later we met again when both of us tried to conquer the slippery uphill. I asked, in English, which kind of ski wax she was using.

Ski waxes are either red, blue or green. Red is for mild weather (0 to -3; -2 to -6), green for really cold weather (-8 to -15; -10 to -18) (se picture below).

My ski waxes.

Blue is for the weather in between.

She replied that she spoke [Uralic]Finnish, English, and Swedish[Finnish]. So the conversation continued in Swedish.

I used the red and green ski wax. She, it turned out, used the blue one. It developed into a really good conversation.

A good conversation is explained by something called entrainment - rhythmic synchronization of behavior (Borrie, 2017), which is similar to a hardware handshake between two old-school modems.

She told me she had some problems with her balance, and because she used to ski when she was younger, she thought skiing would be good for the balance.

- I't called proprioception, I said, and continued: - I'm a psychological scientist with an interest in physical and mental health. I continued with some comments about nutrition, and mentioned that it's important to eat food containing tryptophan and DHA (Docosahexanoic fatty acids), to support health.

The back story to that is that I spent three years as a research leader exploring the future of food production, and consequently, I learned one or two things about nutrition. I also recently listened to an interview Stuart McNish did with Dr. Robert Lustig for the video-pod cast Conversations that Matter.

Lustig, a former professor of Berkeley, has been a proponent of low sugar diets, or diets with no sugar at all. For health. Dr. Lustig's talk, Sugar: The Bitter Truth, has had 16 000 000 views. In the current interview, Lustig was talking about his book The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains, the seven differences between pleasure and happiness, and the 4C - model.

- I know about that, she said, I'm Biochemist and a retired professor. She then added - its important to eat fibers and vegetables.

Suddenly her face, which until then had looked warm and happy, showed this micro contraction, and she didn't look equally varm and happy any more.

My undergraduate in experimental psychology, my bachelor thesis, was about the association between emotions and facial affects (Österberg, 2001; In Swedish).

I also recognized her; we used to be colleagues and meet every now and then, and never had we reached entrainment as colleagues.

The conversation went back to ski wax and other ski-related topics, and we said bye and parted way.

Why was there a change in entrainment?

In 2012, Adam Hajo and Adam Galinsky published a paper called Enclothed cognition.

I had heard about the study when I listen to James Altucher Show. It was mentioned and described by Altucher's guest Todd Herman, who is a performance coach.

In the study, Hajo and Galinsky set up an experiment to test how selective and sustained attention was influenced by the role you took by wearing different clothes. Here's the abstract:

“We introduce the term “enclothed cognition” to describe the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer's psychological processes. We offer a potentially unifying framework to integrate past findings and capture the diverse impact that clothes can have on the wearer by proposing that enclothed cognition involves the co-occurrence of two independent factors—the symbolic meaning of the clothes and the physical experience of wearing them. As a first test of our enclothed cognition perspective, the current research explored the effects of wearing a lab coat. A pretest found that a lab coat is generally associated with attentiveness and carefulness. We therefore predicted that wearing a lab coat would increase performance on attention-related tasks. In Experiment 1, physically wearing a lab coat increased selective attention compared to not wearing a lab coat. In Experiments 2 and 3, wearing a lab coat described as a doctor's coat increased sustained attention compared to wearing a lab coat described as a painter's coat, and compared to simply seeing or even identifying with a lab coat described as a doctor's coat. Thus, the current research suggests a basic principle of enclothed cognition—it depends on both the symbolic meaning and the physical experience of wearing the clothes”.

The result revealed some interesting stuff. Here's the summary of the result:

“In Experiment 1, participants who wore a lab coat displayed increased selective attention compared to participants who wore their regular clothes. In Experiments 2 and 3, we found robust evidence that this influence of clothing depends on both whether the clothes are worn and the symbolic meaning of the clothes”.

Does Hajo's and Galisky's study have any implication on today's meeting?

I think so. Just like the experiment show, wearing a specific "costume" will influence attention, and your state of mind, which in turn influence have your interact with people.

When the biochemist and I, the psychological scientist, two Homo Sapiens with different viewpoints on food and nutrition met at work, we couldn't establish entrainment.

When we, the same persons, met in the ski track, in the role of skiers, we easily established entrainment.

But as soon both of us identified each other as researchers, entrainment went away.

After this experience, I had to call a friend to discuss what had happened. It turned out that our conversation evoked memories of similar kind. The take home message was, simplified, that we cannot have enough of conversations, and that conversations are the way we resolve matters.

Please support the blog via Swish (Sweden) or MobilePay (Finland).

More about my expertise:

Executive coaching for CEOs/managers and workshops to facilitate Organizational Performance, Learning, and Creativity for Problem Solving | Lectures: Nutrition for physical and mental health | Course/lecture: children's emotional and social adjustment and cognitive development | Language training - Swedish | Academy Competency | CV | Teaching skills and experience | Summary of research project | Instagram | Linkedin | YouTube-channel | TikTok | Twitter