Costumes! Props! Action!

A friend triumphantly posted the below on Facebook:

“Found! At Bob Slate’s in Harvard Square, a relic of the old ways, specially ordered because so many folks asked them to bring it back.”

Her post was followed by this comment from a former Globe reporter: “There is something special about a reporter’s pad. When I started out in newspapers, I was very shy and apprehensive about talking to strangers. The pad was like a piece of armor that helped me overcome that. I always give my students reporter’s pads at the beginning of the year. You should see how they perk up and stand straighter and feel ‘professional.’”

Their conversation reminded me of the report that came out last year showing that people are more precise and attentive at tasks if they are wearing a doctor’s coat. The researchers called the effect “enclothed cognition,” the “systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer’s psychological processes.” You wear a lab coat, you feel on point and focused—as long as you think it’s a lab coat. If you think it’s a painter’s coat, the same effect doesn’t apply.

Costumes are important, and so are props—I wonder how the experimental subjects would have fared if they had been given stethoscopes to go along with their lab coats? How many of you have a talismanic tool-of-the-trade that makes you feel authoritative? I’ve been wearing reading glasses for a couple of years now, after a lifetime in contact lenses, and I find that even now, putting on glasses to read makes me feel committed and professorial.

What are your props? Have any of you had to renounce one of modern life’s best props—cigarettes? What was it like not having your smokes to pose and play with anymore?