Wearing casual clothes and flouting the office dress code could make you seem more competent, a Harvard study suggests.
Called the “red sneaker effect”, intentionally standing out from the crowd could send a positive message of status, confidence, and power.
Harvard psychologists Silvia Bellezza, Francesca Gino, and Anat Keinan said: “While unintentional violations of normative codes and etiquette can indeed result in negative inferences and attributions when the deviant behavior appears to be deliberate, it can lead to higher rather than lower status and competence inferences.”
