Clothes and Self-Perception: Clothing Really Does Make the Man

We've known for a long time that clothes affect how we feel about ourselves. Now a new study shows that the way we dress may also affect our cognitive processes.

"Clothes invade the body and brain, putting the wearer into a different psychological state..."



An interesting article with which I agree. I've always said that dressing well for a special occasion like, say, a job interview or even for church every Sunday prepares us for the task at hand. It's all about mindset: preparation to get that new job or humble ourselves to worship our Creator.

So wearing one's 'Sunday Best' now has scientific data to support it.


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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/clothes-and-self-perception.html?_r=1&ref=science



By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
Published: April 2, 2012

If you wear a white coat that you believe belongs to a doctor, your ability to pay attention increases sharply. But if you wear the same white coat believing it belongs to a painter, you will show no such improvement.

So scientists report after studying a phenomenon they call enclothed cognition: the effects of clothing on cognitive processes.

It is not enough to see a doctor’s coat hanging in your doorway, said Adam D. Galinsky, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, who led the study. The effect occurs only if you actually wear the coat and know its symbolic meaning — that physicians tend to be careful, rigorous and good at paying attention.

The findings, on the Web site of The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, are a twist on a growing scientific field called embodied cognition. We think not just with our brains but with our bodies, Dr. Galinsky said, and our thought processes are based on physical experiences that set off associated abstract concepts. Now it appears that those experiences include the clothes we wear.

“I love the idea of trying to figure out why, when we put on certain clothes, we might more readily take on a role and how that might affect our basic abilities,” said Joshua I. Davis, an assistant professor of psychology at Barnard College and expert on embodied cognition who was not involved with the study. This study does not fully explain how this comes about, he said, but it does suggest that it will be worth exploring various ideas.

There is a huge body of work on embodied cognition, Dr. Galinsky said. The experience of washing your hands is associated with moral purity and ethical judgments. People rate others personally warmer if they hold a hot drink in their hand, and colder if they hold an iced drink. If you carry a heavy clipboard, you will feel more important.

It has long been known that “clothing affects how other people perceive us as well as how we think about ourselves,” Dr. Galinsky said. Other experiments have shown that women who dress in a masculine fashion during a job interview are more likely to be hired, and a teaching assistant who wears formal clothes is perceived as more intelligent than one who dresses more casually.

But the deeper question, the researchers said, is whether the clothing you wear affects your psychological processes. Does your outfit alter how you approach and interact with the world? So Dr. Galinsky and his colleague Hajo Adam conducted three experiments in which the clothes did not vary but their symbolic meaning was manipulated.

In the first, 58 undergraduates were randomly assigned to wear a white lab coat or street clothes. Then they were given a test for selective attention based on their ability to notice incongruities, as when the word “red” appears in the color green. Those who wore the white lab coats made about half as many errors on incongruent trials as those who wore regular clothes.

In the second experiment, 74 students were randomly assigned to one of three options: wearing a doctor’s coat, wearing a painter’s coat or seeing a doctor’s coat. Then they were given a test for sustained attention. They had to look at two very similar pictures side by side on a screen and spot four minor differences, writing them down as quickly as possible.

Those who wore the doctor’s coat, which was identical to the painter’s coat, found more differences. They had acquired heightened attention. Those who wore the painter’s coat or were primed with merely seeing the doctor’s coat found fewer differences between the images.

The third experiment explored this priming effect more thoroughly. Does simply seeing a physical item, like the coat, affect behavior? Students either wore a doctor’s coat or a painter’s coat, or were told to notice a doctor’s lab coat displayed on the desk in front of them for a long period of time. All three groups wrote essays about their thoughts on the coats. Then they were tested for sustained attention.

Again, the group that wore the doctor’s coat showed the greatest improvement in attention. You have to wear the coat, see it on your body and feel it on your skin for it to influence your psychological processes, Dr. Galinsky said.

Clothes invade the body and brain, putting the wearer into a different psychological state, he said. He described his own experience from last Halloween (or maybe it should be called National Enclothed Cognition Day).

He had decided to dress as a pimp, with a fedora, long coat and cane. “When I entered the room, I glided in,” he said. “I felt a very different presence.”

But what happens, he mused, if you wear pimp clothes every day? Or a priest’s robes? Or a police officer’s uniform? Do you become habituated so that cognitive changes do not occur? Do the effects wear off?

More studies are needed, he said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 6, 2012

An article on Tuesday about the effects of clothing on cognitive processes misstated the name of the journal that published a recent study showing that wearing a doctor’s white coat led subjects to pay sharper attention. It is The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, not The Journal of Experimental Social Cognition. The article also described the findings of an earlier study incorrectly. In that experiment, people who held a hot drink in their hands rated others personally warmer; it is not the case that people were rated personally warmer if they held a hot drink.

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So when a nation like the United States starts to dress like slobs it's likely that nation will also think and act more and more like slobs and vice versa.

The question here is which came first: the slobby dresser or the slob?

Different Place, Different Time

Time is a human idea and the argument can be made that it does not exist in nature, only in the human mind. What is time but the ever changing present? What is the past but human memories and accounts of events, people and places long gone? What is the future but our intentions and imagination of what events, people and places will be?

This is a photo of a hair tonic salesman in New York City, 1936. Examine it well.

click to enlarge

Never again will this scene or ones like it be seen, especially today. It's like a completely different place, a different world. Why? Some might say that time has changed the way we live and think, but it's not time at all since time does not exist outside the human condition. Things would change even if time did not exist.

So, the question is, what factor changes human society (among other things) if that factor is not time?

The New York Hats

The New York Times recently published an article about hats and hat shops in New York. Reading the article, you will find both the hip hop influence (pink homburg) as well as the classic fedora influence ("we can do better"). The two, while still very much at odds, are bringing about another resurgence of the fedora much like that found after the "Raiders of the Lost Ark" though today's comeback seems to be staying longer over numerous demographics and involves more people, both male and female. Frankly, I am very wary of the hip hop culture but for once I think it is doing something good even if the fedoras it sells are cheap and, in my personal view, ugly beyond belief. One day (we hope) those kids and young adults will acquire grown up tastes and will find something better than the Wal-Mart fedoras.


Here's the article.


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From Harlem to Midtown for That Item to Top Off a Look

By HARRY HURT III
Published: September 22, 2007

I TAXIED up to Harlem in executive pursuit of a stylish lid with my buddy Michael Holman. The morning was cool because a rain front had blown through the night before. Litter swirled around like fall leaves on the wide concrete sidewalks. Holman, balding and bareheaded, was styling Malcolm X glasses, a green leather jacket and a two-day growth of beard.
“It all starts at the top,” he said, staring out the window and grinning.

The cab dropped us off at 146th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, a k a Seventh Avenue, next to a narrow storefront called Harlem’s Heaven. Holman groaned. The wares in the window were ornate, what he called “Sunday-go-to-meeting hats for ladies.” I knocked anyway, and a saleswoman named Danielle, with dreadlocks and a flashing smile, let us in.
“We do have some men’s hats,” Danielle said. “They’re in the back.”

That seemingly innocent remark set the tone for the rest of our quest. Before World War II, hats were an essential part of a man’s wardrobe. Look at photographs of Wall Street crowds in the 1920s and 1930s and you’ll see virtually every male wearing some type of hat, even if he was about to lose his shirt. In recent decades, however, men’s hats, other than baseball caps, have been all but forgotten in fashion.

From August 2006 to July 2007, sales of men’s headwear in the United States were slightly over $1.1 billion, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm. But more than 75 percent of those sales were caps as opposed to fedoras, homburgs and the like. By comparison, sales of women’s headwear, slightly over $1.2 billion, were split roughly 47 percent to 53 percent between caps and hats.

There are almost as many theories about the demise of men’s hats as there are full sizes and quarter sizes. Some hatters say that veterans of World War II and the Korean conflict were weary of military uniformity and shunned hats when they returned to civilian life. Some blame President John F. Kennedy, who wore a top hat to his inauguration but delivered his Inaugural Address bareheaded. Others cite automobiles, whose roofs made hats uncomfortable and unnecessary. My buddy Holman pinned it on the anti-establishment sentiment of the 1960s.
“Men’s hats symbolized the conformity of the 1950s, and the nonconformism of the 60s was a reaction against all that,” he observed as we browsed the back room at Harlem’s Heaven. “You also had men growing their hair long, and hats didn’t fit well with that. When you took off your hat, you got this rumpled ring around your head called ‘hat hair.’ ”

At 48, Holman exudes the kind of hipness I couldn’t affect in my wildest dreams. A filmmaker who teaches at Howard University in Washington, he is also a writer, a musician and a sartorial trendsetter. In 1979, he formed a rock band called Gray with the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat; later, he was a co-author of a screenplay about Basquiate, filmed by Miramax. When performing on stage, Holman and his bandmates wore gray sharkskin suits and porkpie hats.

Despite statistical evidence to the contrary, Holman insists that men’s hats are coming back in style. I trusted his cultural judgment on its own merits and because we share an ancestral connection to Texas. His great-great-great-grandfather, William Holman, fought in the Texas war for independence from Mexico in 1836. A street in Houston, my hometown, is named for William Holman. “You and I are brothers from another mother,” Michael Holman joked.
Not surprisingly, the selection of men’s hats at Harlem’s Heaven was pretty slim. I tried on a wide-brimmed black homburg called the Godfather after the hat Al Pacino wore in the movie. Danielle said it made my face look fat. Holman recommended a blue fedora with a narrower brim. I liked it, too, but it was a Habig, imported from Vienna, and it cost $199, which was quite a bit more than I had planned to spend.

Holman insisted that we check out a store called Porta Bella on 125th Street a few doors down from the Apollo Theater. Its walls were decked with yellow, red and powder-blue zoot suits priced as low as $119. The equally colorful if rather meager stock of men’s hats was stashed in plastic bags in the back of the store. At Holman’s urging, I tried on a $10 pink fedora.
“Oh, man, that’s dope!” he exclaimed.
“Is that good?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Holman replied. “You’ve got to have that hat.”

Immediately upon striding back out onto 125th Street, I began to have second thoughts about the pink homburg. A tall, muscular fellow with a New York Yankees cap looked back over his shoulder at me and shook his head and chortled like I was some kind of circus clown. A woman in ragged clothes begged me to give her a dollar.

“This hat may be dope, but I feel like one,” I told Holman as we hailed another cab.
We taxied down to Worth & Worth at 45 West 57th Street. The firm, established in 1922, has provided hats for clients like William S. Burroughs and David Bowie. We were greeted in the sixth-floor showroom by the resident designer Orlando Palacios, 43, who was wearing a sleeveless shirt and a Stetson festooned with a black stenciled badge that read “Sex Pistols.” Like Holman, Orlando said that men’s hats were making a comeback.

“People want to step away from that cookie-cutter image,” he said. “A hat will change your whole look. It says you’re daring. It pulls people in.”
In addition to Stetsons, Worth & Worth features classic fedoras and homburgs with names like Fellini and Venezia. Orlando also makes custom hats, starting at $450. Holman fancied a vintage-style Donegal tweed cap known as an Applejack or a newsboy, priced at $65. I bought it for him in thanks for his shopping assistance, complimenting him with one of the few hipster terms in my vocabulary.
“You look fly,” I said.

Orlando suggested that I try on a butterscotch Prima Vera fedora made of rabbit and beaver fur. I appreciated the quality of the hand stitching but balked at the $375 price. “That hat’s just got way too much drama,” Holman whispered when Orlando was out of earshot. “And the brim is too wide for your face.”

A few minutes later, Holman and I arrived at Arnold Hatters at 535 Eighth Avenue. The proprietor, Arnold Rubin, 72, welcomed me with a knowing wink. The last time I had visited his store, I was about to have surgery to correct a hammertoe. With Arnold’s guidance, I picked out a chestnut cane to use after the operation as I recovered. This time, I donned my new pink homburg just to see how he would react.

“Looks like you’re walking pretty good,” Arnold said. “We can do better hat-wise.”
Arnold Hatters boasts an inventory of over 160 styles, some of them in as many as 24 colors. Among its celebrity customers are the actor Jimmy Smits, the rapper Ice T and the singer Janet Jackson, who bought a hat the previous Saturday. Arnold fitted me with a $120 navy blue felt fedora with a relatively narrow 2-inch brim, by Bailey of Hollywood.

I reached into the pocket of my blazer and pulled out a 3 1/2-inch steel pin tipped with a pearly white bulb. Arnold helped me stick it into the grosgrain band of the fedora. He asked where on earth I had found such an elegant hatpin. I told him the surgeon had inserted it into my foot to repair the hammertoe. Holman whistled softly.

“Now that is really dope,” he said.

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