Title: Should You Wear a Costume for Halloween? | Psychology Today
Headings: Should You Wear a Costume for Halloween?
Utpal Dholakia Ph.D.
Should You Wear a Costume for Halloween?
The pros and cons of dressing up for undecided readers.
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Reasons why you shouldn’t wear a Halloween costume
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Content: Another benefit of creative costume design is it helps us learn about ourselves. As European social scientists Janine Fron and her colleagues point out, “Dress-up provides the opportunity for transformative play, for in dressing up and taking on new roles, we learn more about ourselves.” To try out a new identity. Today, virtually all opportunities to disguise ourselves and try on a new identity are limited to the online domain. In a virtual game, for example, you can explore what it means to be of a different age, race, or gender, or even a different species altogether. Even on social media, you can carefully curate your posts to produce and communicate a desirable image of yourself. It is relatively easy to shrug off your core self-identities and try on new, exciting, and starkly different identities online. But such a thing is very difficult to pull off in real life. In fact, Halloween offers one of the few sanctioned and widely available opportunities to try out a new identity for a short while and see how it feels. Many of us want to experience what it feels like to be powerful and special.