Overview
If you work in a professional job, there's a good chance you use a laptop. But what do you carry it in? For office workers, there’s been a subtle trend away from traditional rectangular laptop cases toward multi-use backpacks.
Backpacks are easier to carry, free up your hands, and can often carry more than just your laptop. But the backpack has historically been the accessory used by kids going to school. Office workers, in contrast, have used the traditional rectangular laptop case.
This conflict between history and utility raises an interesting question, one we tackled in this study. Does using a traditional laptop case or a backpack make you look more professional?
Experiment
We conducted an experiment with 400 people on Amazon Mechanical Turk in which participants were shown a photo of either a traditional rectangular laptop case or a laptop backpack (randomly assigned). Participants were instructed to “Imagine you work in an office and a new co-worker just arrived carrying his [laptop case / laptop backpack], shown below.”
Participants were then asked “How professional does this co-worker seem to you? (1 = Not at all, 7 = Extremely)” using a 1-7 scale.
Results
There was no practical difference in professionalism between bringing a laptop case (avg. = 5.36) versus a backpack (avg. = 5.33), (p = 0.860). Our 95% confidence interval of -0.27 and 0.19 suggests that even if we were to re-run this study, it is very unlikely we’d find anything more than a trivial difference. Finally, we found no interactions with gender or age.
Conclusion
The results suggest that whichever laptop carrying accessory you choose, you'll look perceived as professional. The modern-day trend of carrying your laptop in a backpack appears to be just as professional as using a traditional laptop case.
Methods Note
To test for significant differences in likability between our experimental conditions, we used an independent samples t-test. For statistically significant results, the difference between the averages of the two groups would be large, and the corresponding “p-value” would be small (p < 0.05). This indicates that if we were to replicate the study with the same population, we would likely obtain a similar effect. Additionally, we utilized OLS regression analyses with interaction terms to explore potential significant interactions between the main results and participant demographics, such as age and gender.
Data and survey materials used for this experiment are available upon request.