How to Be a Snoop

The way you arrange your home or office may reveal

surprising results

In his new book, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, Sam Gosling makes the case
that maybe walls can talk. The personality psychologist and University of Texas at Austin
professor studies bedrooms, offices, Web sites and iPod playlists for personality clues, and
has found, among other trends, that inspirational posters signal a neurotic; an organized
space with sports dcor, a conservative; and a messy room with books, an eclectic music
collection and maps, a liberal. I recently caught up with Gosling to talk about the special
brand of voyeurism he calls snoopology.

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How did you get started snooping?

At Berkeley, where I did my graduate work, my advisor was frustrated that personality
psychologists spent most of their time not studying people but self-reports by peoplewhat
people say they do. He wanted to study what people really do. But that is difficult. If I
wanted to study you, how would I do it? Follow you around all day? How would I do it
unobtrusively? And so I thought, well, some of the things we do leave a trace in the world.
So maybe we can figure out what people do by looking at the spaces where they spend a lot
of time.
You look for behavioral residue?
We do all kinds of behavior everyday. Much of it doesnt leave a trace, like when we smile
or say hello, but a subset does, like when we tidy up our book collection. Behavioral
residue is the residue of our actions, and our actions are the meat of everyday personality.
How do you collect data in, say, a bedroom?
We cover up names or anything thats going to compromise a subjects anonymity. We send
in volunteers whose job is to ask, what is this person like? Next we send in a different team
to inventory the place. What is it like? Is it colorful? Is it bright? Are there books? Then we
give the occupants themselves a personality test and get reports on the occupants from their
good friends. We compare all of those bits of information to find out what people form
impressions of, which ones they form accurately, where they make mistakes and which
cues they use.
Can you describe some of the items you saw and the overall state of an office you
snooped in recently, and explain what conclusions you made about the occupants

personality?
There were all these teaching awards up and you could think, well this person is pompous,
arrogant and wanting to display their awards to everybody. But they were actually all
placed so the person could see them himself. So clearly being a good teacher was much
more important for the occupant himself. They werent really there for the show of others.
The other thing about his office was it was a nice, comfortable space for students to come
sit. This suggested the person was extroverted because extroverts, we know, have these
places designed to essentially lure people in and get them to stay.
Hes somebody who cares about people, but not somebody who is a wild, outgoing, loud
extrovert. That was indicated by combining the arrangement of his furniture with his music
collection, all of which were the sorts of things we expect people who are more into
calming themselves to have, a lot of classical music, a lot of jazz. There was some pop
music there, which is more typically associated with extroverts, but that pop music was at
the end of the bookshelf, not right where the person could reach it and play it.
There was also some evidence of very broad interests, if you looked at the content of the
books and magazines and the mementos that had been collected from exotic places around
the world. There were a lot of things in the office. It was very full. But it was very well
organized. There were dissertations on the bookshelves from his former graduate students.
They were organized by year.
In terms of the traits, I see him very high on openness. He was also high on
conscientiousness. He gets things done on time. Hes reliable and task-oriented. In terms of
his identity, his identity is very much tied up with being a teacher. What I mean by that is if
you were to say, So who really are you?, then, I think one of the first things to come up
would be, Well, Im a professor. I teach. And that's not true of many of the professors
here who are far more identified with being researchers or writers.
Arent a lot of these findings common sense?
Its been somewhat a source of frustration for me that when I report a lot of the findings,
people say, well, thats obvious. But some of the things that are obvious turn out to be
absolutely wrong. One of the most interesting mistakes is overgeneralizing about
someones being neat and tidy. When you have an organized, uncluttered place, it does
mean the person is conscientious. But people go too far and also infer that the persons
agreeable, whereas those clues are not diagnostic of that at all.

What advice do you have for everyday snoopers?

One is not to interpret a single object. Novice snoopers will go in and see a collection of
Russian dolls and say, oh, this person is an expert on Russia, or theyve visited Russia.
Well, sure, but there are many reasons you could have those things in your space. Look for

themes. Be cautious of items that are highly distinctive because those, by definition, are
inconsistent with the themes in the room.
Why arent medicine cabinets revealing?
Despite the widespread belief that medicine cabinets say a lot, the sorts of things we have
in them are so standard theres not a rich palette of expressionunlike music, where theres
so much.
Where do you draw the line when it comes to snooping?
I think looking at peoples diaries, their journals, their trash and all those sorts of things will
provide useful information. But, of course, doing so may compromise your relationship
with that person.
Do people want to be seen for who they really areor some cultivated image?
I think the automatic assumption of many people is to say well, that person is clearly trying
to send a false impression. But what we know from the research is that many of the things
that people are trying to tell others deliberately are authentic statements.
It would be hard for you to fake it because it takes such concerted effort to do that. You
have to live the life of a broad-minded person or a conscientious person to have a space
reflecting that. I tried to organize my cd collection. I said, Im going to be the person whos
organized. And, of course, it only lasted for a day because I just dont live my life that way.
The other reason is that your personality affects how you see the world, so even if I was
going to make my place look conscientious, I wouldnt even think of some of the things
that a truly conscientious person would have. I think, generally, people arent trying to fool
us.
Have you always been a snoop in some sense?
Yeah. But quite frankly, I think most people have always been snoops. I think were
intrinsically interested in other people. Other people have historically provided us the
greatest threats and opportunities so I think were biologically prepared to detect what other
people are like. I think its very important for us to feel that others, and ourselves, are kind
of predictable.

What do your belongings say about you?

Check out the photographs of the rooms of other readers below. Any of them look similar to
your own?
Sam Gosling, psychologist and author of Snoop: What your stuff says about you (Basic
Books, 2008), analysed photos from a handful of New Scientist readers to see what he
could deduce about their personalities.
Gosling has spent a lot of time snooping while researching the psychology of stuff, and he's
learned how a person's personal belongings reveal quite a bit about how they score on the
"big five" personality traits: extroversion, emotional stability, openness, conscientiousness
and agreeableness. To learn more, see Richard Wiseman's review of Snoop.
Gosling notes that an in-person snoop is always more revealing than a photo, because the
snooper can look more closely at things like book titles, greeting cards and iPod playlists.
But even a photo can speak volumes about personality.
If your rooms do look like any of the below, then find out what your stuff could say about
you (you may need to click on some of photos to see full-size versions).
And if any of the photographs below belong to you, then we'd love to hear how accurate
you think Gosling's predictions are....
Amanda Gefter, Opinion editor
****

The first thing that jumps out about this space is the prominent role of socialising. The
spaces are inviting - the sofas arranged for hanging out together; the dining table for
multiple people - and the alcohol and large cooking pans suggest group entertainment. A
closer in-person look would reveal whether the occupants of this home really do entertain
often or whether that is something to which they aspire.
One important lesson my colleagues and I have learned in our snooping research is that it's
crucial to combine clues to figure out what they mean, and to not interpret them in
isolation. Ordinarily we would interpret all those cards above the fireplace as indicating that
the resident values social relationships but it looks like they may be the product of a recent
wedding in which case it would be the norm to have lots of cards around. However, the way
they are displayed so centrally and prominently (and combined with the other clues
mentioned above) suggests that social connections are a high priority for these occupants.
The pictures of the couple are consistent enough that we can assume that the photos portray
the couple that lives here. The pictures suggest that the relationship is a very central part of

the individuals' lives at the moment. And they are displayed for others to see, which means
that the importance of the relationship is something that the couple wants to tell the world,
rather than just enjoy privately.
There is evidence that these occupants are willing to devote energy and time to selfnurturing in their space. The candles have actually been used, not just put there for a
mythical day when they will be lit; the fresh flowers are in a private space, not just out for
show. These sorts of clues show that at least one of the occupants genuinely values
relaxation and taking the time to indulge oneself.
The books in terms of content, number, and variety suggest quite conventional tastes.
****

These spaces are quite conventional in terms of dcor and contents, suggesting a person
with scores lower on openness dimension. The place has not been crafted to create a
sensual, comfortable experience. The shoes left in various places suggest that the occupant
is impulsive, not a careful planner; the half-finished laundry dumped on the floor suggests
someone who is not highly methodical, getting half way through a task and then off to do
something else.
Interestingly, the work area is more organized, suggesting slightly different behaviours
associated with work vs. non-work. We would need to take a closer look at the files and the
desk to see how well used and organised they really are. Even at the desk, though, we see
that this person is not ruled by order; they don't live in an orderly way, but they do get
organised in spurts (note the tidy-ish shelves but the chaos of things on the floor & cabinet
to the left of the office) - in other words this person is mildly chaotic on a daily basis but is
occasionally forced to get things in order when the mess gets too great.
Without seeing the rest of the spaces (especially the public spaces), it's hard to know if the
person is outgoing, but there are few pictures of others and little evidence of daily
interactions here. The places where others might sit (the sofa) have been rendered unusable
by the stuff placed there. Reinforcing this view of an introvert is the evidence of solitary
activities like gardening and the image of someone reading towers of books.
***

This place does not have very much stuff in it - it's not high on external stimulation
suggesting someone not particularly extraverted. The person seems relatively organised
despite the superficial mess on the desk, and appears to have conventional interests - there's
a narrow variety of stuff and not much evidence of diverse interests. There is not much
evidence of social relationships, either, or efforts to make the place comfortable and
inviting to others - suggesting someone introverted, perhaps even lonely.
****

There is so much stuff in this space that we could spend hours going through it but the main
thing that jumps out is the chaos. This mess is different from other messy places in that this
person does not show signs of being disturbed by the mess; in fact, this person may even
gain some feeling of comfort having all of his things around. Many people would go crazy
living in a space like this.
Despite the books lying on their side, the chaos of cables, the unfinished bottles strewn
about and the mountains of stuff, the space still does allow the occupant to function,
suggesting quite a pragmatic person - he gets things done! Indeed that may well be the
driving force behind the mess - the occupant focuses on getting his tasks done, so the place
is tidy enough to do that but no tidier.
****

The various items of dcor here seem to have a personal meaning to the occupant, and don't
seem to be displayed primarily for the benefit of others. These items show the person's
connections to the past - the picture of the soldier (probably some family member), the odd
pie wrappers that would have some special meaning to the occupant, the University degree
that's framed and hung but not placed in a location that's showing off to others all combine
to suggest a person with a coherent sense of self that's strongly rooted in the past. The story
of how he got to where he is helps define who he is.
The messy desk reveals a person who is spontaneous on a daily basis. The variety of things
all around and the busy image on the screen-saver suggests a person at ease with, perhaps
even enjoying, complexity. An in-person inspection would allow us to mine the information
in the CD collection.
****

This person has gone to great lengths to create a sense of calmness, order and relaxation.
There are lots of classic "feeling regulators" here, things that are intended to promote a
certain emotional state: the indirect lighting, the soothing colors, the images that all project
self-assuredness, the items that project flow and serenity and the parallel lines on the
pillows, bed cover and drawers that create a sense of flow without being rigid.
This is a person for whom it is a core value to pamper and indulge the self, someone for
whom being centred, calm and clear-minded is important. If I were snooping in person
here, I would search for other evidence to see if the cultural associations of the iconography
were also central to the person.
*****

This office is interesting because it shows that contrary to peoples' expectations, a place can
be organised without being neat. This photo reveals a deeply structured place but not one
that's neurotically maintained. There is a huge variety of things going on, but the sense of
order runs so deeply that it can be maintained on a daily basis. There is evidence of various
sentimental connections (to pets, for example). That, along with the art supplies and the
distinctiveness of the space suggest that this person scores high on conscientiousness,
openness, and agreeableness and lower on neuroticism.
****

This person values structure and neatness. This is someone who thinks ahead (they buy
supplies before they run out), is methodical, organised, and neat. There is evidence that this
person is highly concerned with and sensitive to aesthetics. The space is crafted for
efficiency, revealing a highly effective worker.
****

The thing that jumps out here is the distinctiveness of the space. The original art suggests
someone very high on openness, someone who has "the Leonardo factor". Leonardo da
Vinci epitomised the openness trait; he was imaginative, inventive and unconventional.
Likewise this person is creative, contemplative, and thoughtful.
****

The arrangement of files here shows a desk of someone who generally keeps on top of
things but occasionally approaches the point of feeling overwhelmed - things have their
place but are straining at the seams. To maintain balance (and sanity!), it appears this
person attends to her needs daily, for both physical and emotional comfort. The orange, the
tea, the foot massager and the "social snacks" (the little platform with sentimental items, the
cards taped to the top of the computer and the bear) all have been assembled to create a
little comfort zone.
****

The books, music, dcor, and clothing suggest someone who is very high on the openness
factor and also somewhat disorganised, a combination that often signals liberal political
orientation (a guess that is somewhat supported by the books). This is a deep thinker who
likes to grapple with the complexities and oddities of life. People who like Heavy Metal
music (revealed by the posters, music, and clothing) tend to be less organised, more open,
and lower on the warm/soft-hearted personality dimensions. In short, this person seems
creative, complex, thoughtful, direct and liberal. Sometimes this person can be critical of
others and dwell on worries.
Sam Gosling, psychologist

What Does Your Space Say About You?

Everything about your home and officefrom your
books and music to your pantrygives the observant
visitor clues to your psyche.

Everything about your home and officefrom your books and music to your pantrygives the observant visitor clues
to your psyche.
By Sally Wadyka for MSN Health & Fitness

When you walk into a home or office, you cant help but
make some immediate assumptions about its occupants.
Not just the obvious stufflike whether theyre messy or
neatbut deeper impressions about what sort of person
inhabits the space, what theyre like, and even whether
youd want to be friends with them. But be careful not to
jump to too many conclusions. One of the biggest mistakes
snoopers make is trying to interpret a single object, says
Samuel Gosling, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of Texas, Austin,
and author of Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You (Basic Books, 2008). You
have to look for themes to get a real clue to someones personality.
In his research, Gosling has decoded the clues that indicate the five big personality
traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
Here are some of the signals you may be sendingconsciously or notto your
visitors.
Your books
Something as simple as your book shelf can reveal a
surprising amount of information about you. Do you have a
noticeably diverse library, with everything from pulp fiction
to weighty non-fiction tomes? Thats a sign that of
openness, and indicates that you are creative, imaginative,
and willing to try new experiences. And if your collection is
incredibly well-organizedneatly shelved and categorized
by genre and authoryou are
bound to rate high on the scale of
conscientiousness.
Your music

A peek at your CD collection or playlists can yield more information about you than
whether or not youre a fan of Top 40. Weve found that extroverts tend to prefer
music with vocals because they connect well with people, while introverts often
favor instrumental music, says Gosling says.
In his experiments of asking students to rank personality traits based on music
lists, he found that those whose taste tended toward jazz and classical were
thought to be more refined and intelligent, while rock and rap music fans were
judged more likely to be less agreeable, and more likely to indulge in drugs and
alcohol.
Your photos
As the saying goes, A picture is worth a thousand words.
Well, turns out that the pictures you choose to display in
your home or officeand the way in which you display
themspeak volumes about your personality. Extroverts
are people who love people, and they make that obvious
by displaying lots of photos of themselves enjoying good
times with their wide circle of friends. Introverts, on the
other hand, are more likely to use pictures of objects or
scenery to decorate their space.
Where your pictures sitespecially in your officeis also very telling. Photos of
your spouse or kids that sit on your desk where you can see them are what
Gosling calls feeling regulatorslittle mementos that make us feel better when
we look at them. But if those same photos are pointing away from you and toward
your visitors, youre announcing, Look at my gorgeous spouse and beautiful kids.
The same photo can serve very different purposes, says Gosling says.
Your artwork
According to Gosling, those who rate highest in openness
tend to be creative, imaginative, artistic types. So if you
walk into someones home and see it decorated with
unique, original artwork, you can be fairly certain thats the
type of personality youre dealing with. And by artwork, that
can also mean any sort of distinctive, youve-never-seenone-before object, like a lamp made out of a vodka bottle
and filled with Prozac tablets (something Goslings snoops
really did see!).
Messy or neat
If you walk into someones office and the desk looks
incredibly clean, neat and organized, your instinct will be to
judge the person whose office it is as highly conscientious
and very on top of things. But before you make that call,
you need to dig a little deeper. Look inside the desk
drawers, advises Gosling says. If the person is truly,

deeply, structurally tidy [and thus conscientious], the drawers will also be neatly
organized. But maybe the desk top is clean only because the person swept all
their her junk into the drawers right before you walked in. In that case, the person
would actually rank very low on conscientiousness.
The notes, letters and messages you keep
Written messagesespecially those you choose to
display in places where both you and others can see them
offer interesting clues to your inner workings. Postcards
from far-flung friends are a sign of an extrovert. Youre a
person who has a large circle of friends and loves to stay
in touch with every one of them. Those who rank high in
agreeableness also value maintaining connections to
peoplebut in a more sentimental way. Look for things
like thank-you notes and heart-felt birthday cards. Someone who has inspirational
quotes and motivational mantras on display most likely falls under the personality
trait of neuroticism. These are thought and feeling regulators that someone who is
neurotic, anxious and worried will use to self-medicate, says Gosling says.
Hoarding
The word conjures up images of homes made nearly
uninhabitable by the sheer volume of stuff thats piled up
absolutely everywhere. But as with most environmental
evidence, hoarding can be a sign of several different
personality traits. Eric Abrahamson, a Columbia University
professor and author of A Perfect Mess, divides
hoarders into three categories. The utilitarian hoarders
are those who hold onto anything and everything they
think they might need to use someday. One who collects old letters, bills, receipts,
and other records of their his life he calls a narcissistic hoarder. And those who
save mementos of meaningful experienceslike childhood toys, vacation
souvenirs, or a favorite plate thats now brokenAbrahamson calls sentimental
hoarders.
Your pantry
There are those whose cupboards are filled with halfempty boxes and containers; people who are likely to not
realize theyre low on supplies until the last drop of milk or
flake of cereal has been poured out. And then there are
the highly conscientious types whose pantries are not
only well-organized, but perpetually well-stocked. If you
arent one of these people, youll want to have one as a
neighbortheyll always have extra rolls of toilet paper or
cans of tomato sauce handy if you run out.

Your furniture arrangement

Is your office set up for one, or made to accommodate a
crowd? Introverts will set up their spaces for their own
comfort, but might not even have a spare chair to offer
visitors (because, to be honest, theyd rather no one
visited). But extroverts will go out of their way to create
spaces that foster social interaction. The door is always
open. There might be a candy dish out to lure in guests,
and there will definitely be comfy chairs to encourage
visitors to linger longer.

Are you talking about me?

According to the psychologist Sam Gosling, the minutiae of our private spaces hold the
secrets of our true personality. Here he runs his test on six public figures, from John
Simpson to Julian Clary. What might he unearth about them? And will they agree with his
analysis?
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The Guardian, Saturday 28 June 2008

If you're like me, you do more than passively observe the surroundings when you enter
someone's living space for the first time. I look around, collecting and processing
information about the occupant. Would I excuse the host for a moment? Absolutely! Quick,
over to the bookcase. Scan the books. A guidebook to budget travel in Madagascar. A tiny
gift edition of Virginia Woolf's A Room Of One's Own. Interesting. Now the photos. Hmm,
all but one show my host with a big group of friends in a moment of drunken hilarity. No
time to dwell, there are still the CDs, the wastepaper basket and that pile of junk on the
windowsill. And all this before I've had a chance to snoop through her medicine cabinet...
I am a professor of psychology at the University of Texas, and specialise in the study of
personality differences and how people form impressions of others in daily life. My
research focuses on the premise that people's possessions tell us even more about their
personalities than face-to-face meetings or, sometimes, what their best friends say about
them. My graduate students and I have conducted many studies: we've peeked under beds
and peered into cupboards; we've riffled through music collections; we've scrutinised
Facebook profiles. We've visited more than 80 student bedrooms and nearly 100 offices in
banks, estate agents, business schools, advertising agencies and architecture studios.
When you first meet someone, you don't notice that you're forming an impression by
integrating information - from his shaved head or the maps on his living room wall to the
firmness of his handshake. Sometimes these processes go awry. In our studies, judges used
the presence of art and books on art to infer that occupants leaned to the left. But, in fact,
these things bore no relation to political affiliation. What did give clues to (conservative)
political leanings, though, was sports-related decor, a clue that our judges overlooked. This
tells us that although common sense often gets it right, it can also lead us in the wrong
direction.
For my first project, in 1997, I assembled a team of environmental assessors and recruited
student volunteers who, at a specified time, would vacate their rooms. While they were
gone, I would send in my team of assessors to form an impression of them purely from
evidence in their rooms. The rooms varied much more than I had expected. Some contained

little more than a modest bed in the corner. Others were so full of objects and decorations
that our assessors had to be careful not to crush the evidence they were there to examine.
Winnie-the-Pooh and friends were featured in a surprising number of rooms. Some spaces
were meticulously arranged; others suggested that the occupant was aiming for orderliness
of the "somewhere in the room" kind. Some were cosy, others cold.
Photographs on display capture a moment the person wanted to record: "I am a
freewheeling world traveller" (picture of a grungy young man on the roof of a train as it
climbs through the mountains of Rajasthan). "I am a loving daughter" (a teenager hugging
her parents). "I am a successful student" (a young man collecting an award). Identity claims
can be made on T-shirts, badges, nose rings, tattoos, email signatures, posters, bumper
stickers.
In practice, it can be hard to tell whether an identity claim is self-directed or other-directed.
Displaying a poster of Martin Luther King Jr may simultaneously reinforce your view of
yourself and communicate your values to others, but it is useful to treat the two kinds of
claims as separate. This distinction may help us understand the difference between public
and private spaces. In a home, what distinguishes the hallway, dining room, living room
and guest bathroom, which are sure to be seen by others, from spaces that require a higher
security clearance, such as the bedroom, study or private bathroom? Perhaps there is
religious iconography, such as a cross or menorah, in the public places, but reminders of
family in the private places. Or the other way around.
Much of the stuff we gather about us and the environments we create are there not to send
messages about our identities but specifically to manage our emotions and thoughts.
"Feeling regulators" - family photos, keepsakes, the CDs in the stereo, even the colour of
the walls - can help a person reminisce about bygone happy times, focus on an important
task or get pumped up for a night on the town. People also use music to manipulate and
maintain their feelings and thoughts, and their choices can be a useful clue to personality.
Consider one useful definition of personality: an individual's unique pattern of thinking,
feeling and behaving that is consistent over time. If you alphabetise your book collection
just once, that does not make you an organised person. If you try a new dish on a menu
once, that does not suggest that broadmindedness is a part of your personality. For a
behaviour to be part of your personality, it should be something that you do repeatedly; and
the more often you do it, the more likely there is to be evidence of it among your
belongings.
In collating evidence from people's surroundings, it is useful to have a yardstick - to be able
to enter a bedroom or browse a music collection with a set of questions in mind focusing on
the known ways in which people tend to differ.
By far the most extensively examined - and firmly established - system for grouping
personality traits is the framework known as the Big Five. The Big Five traits are openness,
conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, which, arranged in that
order, conveniently spell out OCEAN.

Here is a test you may like to try to assess your own character traits. Score the following
from 1 to 7 (1 Disagree strongly; 2 Disagree moderately; 3 Disagree a little; 4 Neither agree
nor disagree; 5 Agree a little; 6 Agree moderately; 7 Agree strongly). I see myself as:
1 Extroverted, enthusiastic...
2 Critical, quarrelsome...
3 Dependable, self-disciplined...
4 Anxious, easily upset...
5 Open to new experiences, complex...
6 Reserved, quiet...
7 Sympathetic, warm...
8 Disorganised, careless...
9 Calm, emotionally stable...
10 Conventional, uncreative...
Work out your Big Five score as follows:
Openness = (8 - your score on item 10) + your score on item 5;
Conscientiousness = (8 - your score on item 8) + your score on item 3;
Extroversion = (8 - your score on item 6) + your score on item 1;
Agreeableness = (8 - your score on item 2) + your score on item 7;
Neuroticism = (8 - your score on item 9) + your score on item 4.
This should give you five scores, one for each of the Big Five dimensions. To find out
where you stand, you can compare your scores with those of many thousands of people
who have taken this test. In our research we have found the following averages: Openness:
10.8 females, 10.7 males; Conscientiousness: 11.0 females, 10.4 males; Extroversion: 9.1
females, 8.5 males; Agreeableness: 10.6 females, 10.1 males; Neuroticism: 6.7 females, 5.7
males.
The Big Five categories are tremendously broad. Extroversion, for instance, subsumes
friendliness, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity level, excitement seeking, and

cheerfulness. (For a detailed rundown of your Big Five scores, try the 120-question test
online at John Johnson's excellent website, personal.psu.edu/j5j/IPIP/ipipneo120.htm)
People at the high end of the openness scale enjoy questioning norms and conventions; they
like to play with ideas and have vivid imaginations. In contrast, the relatively conventional
people at the other end of the scale prefer the concrete to the abstract and the known to the
unknown. An icon of openness is Leonardo da Vinci, the painter of the Mona Lisa and the
far-sighted inventor of submarines and air-cooling systems.
My icon of conscientiousness is "half man, half machine, all cop" - RoboCop, the central
character from the film by that name. RoboCop is efficient, rule-oriented and duty-bound.
People who are high on conscientiousness plan ahead. They like order. They buy computer
paper before it runs out. They store spare stamps in their wallets. They tend not to become
distracted.
My extroversion icon is Axel Foley, Eddie Murphy's character in the Beverly Hills Cop
movies. Foley is talkative, enthusiastic, cheerful, energetic and gregarious, just the kind of
person you want at a party.
Despite the name, agreeableness does not really refer to people who are pushovers. It's
more about interpersonal warmth. People low on this trait are frank in their opinions, and
not particularly concerned with others' feelings. American Idol's Simon Cowell (or at least
the way he portrays himself on the show), who is known for his cruel putdowns,
exemplifies the low end of this pole.
Neuroticism refers to people who are easily stressed. They worry a lot, often ruminating
about what lies ahead or what has just happened. The icon of high neuroticism is the
chronically ruffled, perpetually anxious Woody Allen. At the other end of the spectrum
reclines "the Dude" from The Big Lebowski, the 1998 Coen brothers movie.

'What Your Stuff Says About You'

Author Sam Gosling talks about how he can determine a person's personality by looking at
their possessions. His new book is called, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You.
Copyright 2008 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For
other uses, prior permission required.
NEAL CONAN, host:
This is Talk of the Nation. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. The framed items on the wall of
my office include my FCC third-class radio telephone operator's license from 1973 and the
New York Times crossword puzzle from the day my name was used as a clue. There's a
baseball on my desk, not signed or anything, just a baseball. Some toys sit on top of the
speaker, a beach chair with a life preserver, a double-decker London bus, and a cork board
has family pictures, John F. Kennedy behind the wheel of PT109, and a postcard of Giant's
Stadium in New Jersey. Sam Gosling, are those few things enough to tell you anything
about what kind of person I am?
Dr. SAM GOSLING (Psychology, University of Texas; Author,"Snoop: What Your Stuff
Says About You"): Yeah, they certainly could tell us a lot. There's a lot of information, a lot
of it not so obvious but there's a lot of information in places like people's personal spaces,
their offices or their living spaces.
CONAN: And not just what they are, but the way they're arranged. For example, if the
family pictures look out to the guest in the office or inward to the person who occupies it.
Dr. GOSLING: Yeah. It's really crucial to combine not only what they are, but how they've
been placed. Because how they've been placed gives us good information on the
psychological function that they serve, so if we have photos of say our family and our
beautiful spouse facing us, that shows it's for our own benefit.
It's what you might call a social snack, something we can snack on to make ourselves feel
better over the day. If it's turned the other way, then it's more for the benefit of others,
which doesn't mean it's disingenuous. It may not be trying to pull the wool over people's
eyes but it informs the function that that photo serves.

CONAN: Sam Gosling studies personality by looking at stuff. Stuff in offices, bedrooms,
cars and bathrooms. What's there and how it's arranged can provide clues about who we are
and what's important to us. So we want you to call or email us and describe the room or the
car you're in right now. What's on the wall or the desk, the videos and the CDs, the bumper
stickers, your radio presets. Our phone number is 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org.
You can also join the conversation on our blog talk at npr.org/blogofthenation.
Later on in the show, the romance and monotony involved in real archeology. But first, Sam
Gosling. He's an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas in Austin. His
new book is called "Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You," and he joins us today from
the studios of member station KUT in Austin. Thanks very much for coming in.
Dr. GOSLING: Pleasure.
CONAN: And your book is called "Snoop," because that's what you propose to teach us
what to do.
Dr. GOSLING: Yeah. Snooping around people's places, and I should say that I construe
"places" very, very broadly. Not only our physical environments but our oral environments,
too, such as our music collections, our virtual environments like our personal home pages
or our Facebook profile. So if people who want to call in want to talk more broadly about
spaces, that would be fun, too.
CONAN: And of course, to figure out what personality type - what stuff tells you about
you, you have to know what personality types are to begin with. Introvert, extrovert are two
that I guess everybody knows about.
Dr. GOSLING: That's right. And there are a number of ways of thinking about personality.
You can think about personality traits, which is what most research has done on it, and
within that domain there's the system known as the "Big Five," or the "five-factor
framework," which talks about these different traits. As you say, introversion-extroversion
is the main one, but there are other important ones, too.
CONAN: And how did you get interested in this? Are you a natural born snoop?
Dr. GOSLING: Well, I think we're all natural born snoops. I mean, some of us are more
curious than others. Some of us will open the medicine cabinet when we go to a party and
some of us won't. But I think we all do because it is crucial. If you think, who are the
people - what is the element of the environment that's most important to us in terms of how
well we get on in terms of professional lives and personal lives? It's other people. So I think
we're naturally attuned to picking up whatever information is out there, and there is a lot of
information out there in people's spaces. So I think we all do it.
CONAN: And so we size people up as soon as we see them, as soon as we shake their hand,
for example.

Dr. GOSLING: Yeah, as soon as we shake their hand. And you know, the handshaking has
been part of etiquette books for years and years and years, but it was only recently that it
was really subjected to a really rigorous study. There was a study done by Bill Chaplain in
2000 which looked at exactly that. It looked at what can you learn about someone from a
handshake.
CONAN: And sometimes, it's interesting, you can learn something about it but you can also
come to a conclusion that's easily wrong.
Dr. GOSLING: Right. That's the point, yes. For example, taking the example of
handshaking, if somebody grips your hand firmly and looks you in the eye and smiles as
they're doing it, then we form an overall positive impression of them. We form all kinds of
positive things. Yet it turns out that the handshaking firmness is only a clue to some traits.
So we are going beyond the evidence. And so, it's really important to know which are valid
clues and which ones are misleading.
CONAN: And in the clip of tape that we heard at the beginning of the program and
throughout your book, you use the example of Agatha Christie's great detective, Hercule
Poirot.
Dr. GOSLING: That's right, because it's really important - you know, if I had one wish, one
wish in the world, it would be that one clue told you something about a person. If you have
a stuffed teddy on your bed, it meant something, you know. But the world is more
complicated than that. So unfortunately, it doesn't work like that because there are many
reasons why we might have, say, a stuffed animal on our bed or something like that. And so
really, you can't use a code book approach where x means y.
What you have to do is you have to build up a picture piece-by-piece, and sometimes you
only have a very little piece and you have to hold your view very tentatively. But that will
guide your search for more information.
CONAN: So that postcard of Giants Stadium, well, it could tell you that I'm a Giants fan,
which is true, but it could also tell you that I grew up in New Jersey.
Dr. GOSLING: It could, or it might have sentimental meaning. Who is it from? Is it from
somebody important? And so in order to resolve that what we would do is we would look
for other clues. So the baseball there would begin to resolve the meaning of the postcard
itself.
We might also see, well, these other items, the crossword puzzle, these other things which
might modify the meaning of that, which help us resolve, OK, so maybe recognition is
important. We learn that you're somewhat sentimental. And that helps us clarify the
meaning of each clue.
CONAN: Somewhat, all right. I'll bite for somewhat sentimental. Anyway, let's see if we
can get some callers in on this conversation. We're talking with Sam Gosling about his new

book "Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You." Erin, Erin is calling us from Santa Rosa in
California.
ERIN (Caller): Hello.
CONAN: And where are you, Erin?
ERIN: I'm driving around beautiful Sonoma County on this foggy day.
CONAN: And what is it in your car that you've sort of ornamented your car with?
ERIN: I have, well, the reason I was calling is because when you said that on air I started
laughing because I have a temporary tattoo of a white tiger in my cup holder, and I have a
parrot pen right next to that, very colorful, and some very random things. And I just started
laughing when I heard that because you know, what does that say about me?
CONAN: And other than the NPR station, what are the presets on your radio?
ERIN: Well, other local public radio stations, and that's pretty much it. And then just lots of
CDs.
CONAN: And can you give us a couple of titles?
ERIN: Of some of the CDs? Well, I've been really into - I listen to a lot of M.I.A., her
album, her newest album is very awesome. And then I have a lot of - I have Talking Heads'
"Little Creatures," that's kind of one of my favorites that I resort back to over and over
again. And what else do I have? I have Bjork, I have Blonde Redhead...
CONAN: Sam Gosling...
ERIN: I have hundreds, hundreds.
CONAN: Hundreds of CDs. So, Sam Gosling, music, you say, is really, really revealing.
Dr. GOSLING: It can be very revealing, yeah, because it's such a broad palace. There's so
many things we can do. We can look at the individual preferences for certain traits which
tells us something, but we can also look at the themes there. So is there a lot of vocal
music? Is there a very wide variety of music? And so on. And it's important because if you
think, many of our activities require that we create an environment. So if you really want to
concentrate, you go to a library or a quiet place. You don't go to a nightclub. And the thing
about music is you can change what a space is like very, very quickly just by playing
something. And in the case of Erin's music, what I noticed was it was very broad and you
know, a wide variety of items.
CONAN: Eclectic.

Dr. GOSLING: Eclectic. Very eclectic. And that's a crucial clue, and especially when we
learn that she has lots of talk stations and NPR stations on her radio. So we would combine
those sorts of things. That would help clarify the meaning of it to say she's, you know, this
would suggest that she is an intellectual, broad-minded sort of person.
You know, I'd like to get - what's really important is sometimes this will direct our
questioning. So we'd like to learn more about that tiger. Why is that tiger important?
Sometimes what's important is we'll see a clue and even if we don't know what that clue
means, what it's really important to is it opens a gateway, it opens a gateway to ask
questions that we might otherwise not have asked. So we can ask about that tiger, why, of
the million things that you could have there, why has that stayed there? And try and dig a
bit deeper.
CONAN: So if we really wanted to know Erin, that's the question we would ask. So, Erin?
ERIN: My boyfriend bought it for me at the pharmacy, actually.
Dr. GOSLING: OK.
CONAN: OK.
Dr. GOSLING: So we're learning the sentimental, you know...
CONAN: And we're also learning, Erin, that you spend a lot of time in your car.
ERIN: I do. I do. I'm a college student who is always going back and forth. I also have a
UC-Berkeley sticker on my car.
CONAN: That would have been a big clue, too.
ERIN: Yeah, yeah. I didn't want to give too much away. I was trying to keep some, you
know.
CONAN: Oh, yeah. Keep that air of mystery.
ERIN: Yes, exactly. Well, thank you.
Dr. GOSLING: You know, I'd like to see where the tattoo went because tattoos are very
interesting. Because that's one of these forms of often what I call an "identity statement."
This is where you make claims to others. Of course, it depends where it is but if you put it
in a public place for others to see. You know, we talked earlier about the photos in the office
of whether it's facing yourself or facing others. Tattoos are another great way of doing that.
And of course, a tattoo is a far bigger commitment than just putting up a photo on your
desk.
CONAN: Erin - in Erin's case I think it was a temporary tattoo.

Dr. GOSLING: Right, exactly. So that would tell us something, too.

CONAN: Well, maybe the boyfriend's on the way out, you never know.
Dr. GOSLING: Right.
CONAN: Or maybe she - see, it's easy to read stuff into this and boy, is it easy to be wrong.
Dr. GOSLING: Right, absolutely. It's easy to jump to wrong conclusions. There are a lot of
errors to make there. The first, of course, is trying to make too much of any single clue
because - when the clues that stand out, that's one of the easy mistakes to make is that our
attention is automatically drawn to things that stand out. And those are the ones we have to
be really careful with.
CONAN: We are talking with Sam Gosling, author of the new book "Snoop: What your
stuff says about you." More on the book in a moment, including a chapter that defends
stereotypes. We'll get to that, and we want to find out what your stuff says about you.
Where are you? What decorations, ornaments, have you added to your car, your bedroom,
your living room, wherever you're listening to the program? 800-989-8255. Send us email,
too. The address is talk@npr.org. I'm Neal Conan. It's the Talk of the Nation from NPR
News.
(Soundbite of music)
CONAN: This is Talk of the Nation. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Later in the hour, what
a real-life archeologist does and how much it might relate to the fictional life of Indiana
Jones. But first, we're talking about what our stuff, our posters, our photos, our CDs and
videos, what all of it says about who we are. Sam Gosling makes a living in part by judging
personalities based on the stuff we keep and how we arrange it. His book is called "Snoop:
What Your Stuff Says About You." You can read an excerpt from the book at npr.org/talk,
and if you'd like to give it a try, take a look at the stuff around you right now. Give us a call,
800-989-8255. Or zap us an email, talk@npr.org.
And Sam Gosling, we mentioned stereotypes. There's an experiment you describe in the
book where people are - pictures are taken of drivers and their cars separately, and people
are asked to see which driver goes with which car. And in that context, you say, well,
stereotypes are useful. Older people tend to have a little more money so maybe the more
expensive car belongs to them.
Dr. GOSLING: Yeah, absolutely. So stereotypes typically are based on something. They can
lead us astray, too. So what I recommend is if you know nothing, if you know nothing to
begin to use stereotypes as an initial armature on which to base your judgment, and then
you can begin to dress it up more finely with specific clues. In the case of the cars, they
were making stereotypes and that that helped them to a certain extent. We found people
using stereotypes in bedrooms, too, and in some cases it helped, in some cases it hurt.

CONAN: Give us an example of each.

Dr. GOSLING: OK. So for example, that there's a stereotype in terms of personality that
women are higher on a couple of these big five traits I talked about. One of these is known
as agreeableness, if you want to think of it as the - sort of the "Mr. Roger's" factor. This is
people who are nice, kind, sympathetic, and so on. So the stereotype is that women are
higher on that.
And the other stereotype is that women are higher on the trait of what's known as
neuroticism, sort of "Woody Allen" factor. That is, they're more easily stressed, they're
more emotional, they're more moody and so on. So there are these stereotypes about
women. And it was true that when our judges went into rooms, they judged those rooms
they believed they belonged to females - and they almost always got it right - they judged
those rooms to be higher on agreeableness and higher on neuroticism.
However, it turns out that in that sample, the stereotype was only valid in the case of
neuroticism, so the women in our study were higher on that trait but they weren't higher on
agreeableness. And so it helped in the case of neuroticism, in fact, the stereotype helped it,
improved accuracy, whereas it actually got in the way of accuracy in the case of
agreeableness. It misled the judges.
CONAN: So you might want to start there but you also might want to be ready to abandon
the thesis as soon as you get more information.
Dr. GOSLING: Absolutely.
CONAN: Let's see if we can get another caller on the line. This is AK(ph). AK is with us
from Dixon, Illinois.
AK (Caller): Hello.
CONAN: Hi.
AK: How you doing?
CONAN: Very well, thanks.
AK: Well, let me say I'm a big collector of stuff. And I'm sitting in my office. I'm a writer
and around me is cow bones that I've picked up on hikes and deer antlers and strange
taxidermy things, and although I'm not religious, a lot of iconic Catholic and Christianity
prints and empty bottles and things like that.
CONAN: And what would that tell you about AK, Sam Gosling?

Dr. GOSLING: Well, it would be hard to know exactly what that is without learning a bit
more about those associations. What we do know, though, about collectors - and collectors
are different from hoarders. Hoarders are people who just collect everything.
CONAN: Can't throw it away.
Dr. GOSLING: Can't throw it away and that their collections cause them great distress.
What we know about collectors is they tend to be - take pleasure in these collections and
enjoy them. So it's quite different. And they also tend to be slightly higher on this big five
trait which is known as conscientiousness. These are people who are orderly, organized and
tend to be on the ball. But from any single clue you have to be very, very tentative in the
judgments you make.
CONAN: Are you organized and diligent, AK?
AK: I try to be.
Dr. GOSLING: OK. You know, I would be very - whenever you ask, the last person to ask
if they're organized is the person themselves. So it's one of these traits that we have
extraordinarily little insight on ourselves because we've all had that experience where we're
about to go into someone's home and they say, oh, you can't come in, it's in a terrible mess,
you know. Oh, it's awful. And you go and what they mean by a terrible mess is that one of
the coasters on the table is out of alignment or something like that. And that's because
people with different personalities perceive the world differently.
And so this is the last person you should ask, is the person themselves. What we should
really do is ask AK's friends, who would either be the ones who know they can turn to her
for a spare stamp, if they need it, or also know they need to tell her the movie starts ten
minutes before it really does because they're tired of waiting for her.
AK: Well, I think that most of my friends are just always trying to discern what the method
to the madness is. And my grandparents' home was things on top of things on top of things.
But they weren't hoarders. They were basically obsessed with collecting things that
represented their lives. You know, one thing was oriental rugs and they would be nailed
down on top of each other. And I think that perhaps it might be sort of a family thing.
CONAN: Genetic, that might be.
AK: Yeah.
CONAN: OK, AK, thanks very much for the call.
Dr. GOSLING: And not necessarily genetic. There's some marvelous work being done by
this architect called Chris Travis(ph), who goes about creating - he designs homes for
people and he said it's remarkable, it's remarkable how often people, when they're creating
their spaces, are trying to recreate the space often of a grandparent. Because a grandparent

was a time - a grandparent's home was where we went with our kids, with our parents often
when they wanted to escape, relax and so on. And it's astonishing how often the places
people create when they're able to, when they have the means to create those spaces, how
often they try to recreate that feeling of a grandparent.
CONAN: Here's an email question we have from Lynn. "What does it say when you don't
include personal items in your office or your car, et cetera?"
Dr. GOSLING: Well, it could mean a number of things. It often can mean that people want
to have a big separation between their work and so on. That is, they don't want to bring
their selves, their home selves into the workspace. They're trying to keep those lives
separate.
It may mean, depending on what it looked like, that they're low on extraversion because we
know that extroverts, they tend to decorate their spaces more. They tend to make them
inviting places. They want people to come in. Extroverts just like people. And they are
trying to lure you into their office so you'll come in and yack with them rather than work.
CONAN: Actually work, right. And I have to say, this is more than just a parlor trick of you
know, something that amuses everybody, and it's interesting. This is actually used by - well,
not just psychologists but law enforcement.
Dr. GROSLING: That's right. Of course, the FBI are doing something similar. They are
looking for slightly different sort of behavior than we're looking for. They're looking for
criminal behavior, whereas what I'm looking at is ordinary, everyday behavior. But that's
very useful. You know, many of the judgments we make in everyday life, in terms of like
who to promote and so on, is based on everyday behaviors.
CONAN: Let's see if we can get another caller in. And this is Tina, Tina with us from
Ithaca, New York.
TINA (Caller): Hello.
CONAN: Hi.
TINA: Well, what can I say? My apartment - I'm in my bedroom now and I've got a couple
of Japanese block prints and some framed Van Gogh prints and a painting that I've done on
the wall. And everything kind of has a, you know, quasi-Oriental feel to it, sort of Asian
style things.
Dr. GOSLING: How are they arranged? Where are they?
TINA: Well, I've tried to distribute everything so nothing's too cluttered. I don't know, I
guess everything is positioned so as soon as you walk in, the first things and the painting I
did is right above the bed.

CONAN: If you're lying in the bed, what do you see?

TINA: If I'm lying in the bed I see the Japanese block print and the Van Gogh prints in the
window.
Dr. GROSLING: Well, people who have original art on their walls, that tends to be one of
the big clues to this trait I mentioned before - openness, broadmindedness, and so on. But I
would wonder what function these things are serving. So presumably, they're making you
feel a certain way, and it would be very - this would be one of the really useful
opportunities where it would help direct either my searching in the apartment for other
things or even my questioning.
The truth is, of course, it's very rare that we go into someone's bedroom or their living
space when we've never actually met them. You can do that, and that's indeed what I do
with my research, I sent my research team into people's spaces who they had never met.
But in real life, that's a rather unusual situation.
What this is really useful for is supplementing our knowledge of someone. And indeed, you
can learn things about people from their spaces or their Web pages or whatever, that even
their friends don't know.
CONAN: And that even they might not be aware they're saying.
Dr. GOSLING: They may not be aware.
TINA: One thing I wanted to mention as well is that I dated a fellow who I'm still good
friends with, and he admitted the fact that he laid out like Proust and James Joyce novels,
and you know, he bought the little lamp from the New Yorker just to project this idea.
Dr. GOSLING: Yeah. Right. Well - go ahead.
CONAN: I was just saying, that's one of the questions that you ask yourself in your book, is
it possible to, well, sell yourself as something that you're not?
Dr. GOSLING: Yeah. And it's possible to do it to sort of a superficial glance. But I would
suspect that your former boyfriend wouldn't have been able to get very far with that
because in order to really pull that off, as soon as the conversation turned to Proust and it
transpired that, you know, he's never even heard of him, or whatever, or if you looked
through the book and found that the pages weren't really read, you know, it's harder to pull
off. You can pull off something, and that's why living spaces are so good because it's a
really difficult task to pull it off.
It's easy in a conversation. If I was to meet you, you know, if you'd go on a date with
somebody, it's easy to say, oh, yes, I like Proust. But in a living space, in order to portray
yourself as a true intellectual, it takes more than just buying a couple of books to do it.

TINA: Yeah, exactly.

CONAN: Tina, how long did it take you to see through him?
TINA: What's the...
Dr. GOSLING: Two minutes.
TINA: Oh, he readily admitted it when he realized the kind of person I was.
(Soundbite of laughter)
It was ridiculous. To this day, it's a big joke, especially the New Yorker lamp, it's
completely ridiculous.
CONAN: Tina, thanks very much for the call.
TINA: Yes, thank you.
CONAN: So long. And here's an email we got from Chin Yerei(ph) - I hope I'm
pronouncing that correctly - in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who says: "And/or my email
signature,"- we mentioned that at the beginning of the show - "and the email signature is
injustice anywhere, is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable
network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly,
affects all indirectly. That from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., letter from Birmingham Jail,
April 16th, 1963."
And those little quotes that people put at the end of their emails, well, that's one clue, don't
you think?
Dr. GOSLING: It is a clue, and it's a really useful clue because many of the clues that we
face in everyday life, we don't really know where they came from. So, you know, do we
know that Erin's bumper sticker was - did she put the UC-Berkeley thing on the car? Maybe
she did, or maybe she inherited it when she got the car. And the thing about email
signatures is we know who they belong to. So it's very, very useful. And it requires
someone to actually go in and put it there. So that's one reason it's useful.
The other reasons it's useful is it normally gets to somebody's deep values. And so we
talked about personality traits before, things like extroversion, conscientiousness and
openness. But things like email traits, they go really to the heart of who someone is, their
core values. And so something like, you know, it's obvious what it is saying in that, you
know, somebody who has sort of progressive values and so on and sees the broader
connections in life. But what's really useful here is we know, OK, this is something we
should pay attention to. This is something the person wants us to know. And it's probably
not - it's a truthful statement about them.

CONAN: And what does the Martin Luther King quote suggest to you?
Dr. GOSLING: Oh, as I said, I think it's sort of someone who has progressive values. I
mean, again, the particular quote in this case is not, you know, is not particularly difficult to
interpret. I mean, we all know what Martin Luther King stood for. But it's really that we
know that this is an important clue, is the trick.
CONAN: Sam Gosling's book is "Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You." You're
listening to Talk of the Nation from NPR News.
And let's get Dicky on the line. Dicky's with us from Portland, Oregon.
DICKY (Caller): Hello, good morning.
CONAN: Happy Holiday.
DICKY: Hey, my question is involved with - my question is about the people who
purposefully go out and kind of manipulate the personal information around them. I
remember even as a child reading a book on handwriting recognition and forcing myself to
change the handwriting. And also, with my Internet personalities because what I do for
some podcasts, the sort of places I write, I purposefully create not misinformation but kind
of things that would miss - that would cause people to head off in another direction if they
were trying to, you know, research my data shadow on the net.
CONAN: Give me a quick for instance.
DICKY: Well, for example, my first name, you know, the name that you're using right now,
Dicky Adams in Portland, Oregon is not really where I'm from. And - but the Internet
personality for what people know of me through freelanceswitch.com would know me as
Dicky Adams from Portland, Oregon.
CONAN: I see. So he wants us to think he's from a rainy place, Sam Gosling.
Dr. GOSLING: Yeah, he wants us to think a lot of things. He seems to be a slippery
character, yeah.
CONAN: Yeah, so that alone might tell you something.
(Soundbite of laughter)
CONAN: Are you an especially slippery...
DICKY: It's not so much to be a slippery character, it's more - because I want to make sure
that my - I value my privacy and I try to keep my data shadow very small as far as the net is
concerned. But people who get to know me personally, in person, I'm perfectly willing to
share that information with them.

CONAN: And Dicky, or whoever he may be, raises an interesting point. There is so much
about us available not just in our living rooms and our office cubicles. But Sam Gosling, as
you mentioned, on the Web there is tremendous amounts of information.
Dr. GOSLING: Yeah, there's tremendous amounts of information. Much of the most useful
information, though, is really what we put there. Because unlike Dicky, it turns out, and lots
of social psychological research has shown this, most of us actually want to be known. So
there is a lot of suspicion about people, oh, we're trying to pull the wool over other people's
eyes. But there's a lot of research shows that people are happier when they are known,
when people see - when they are seen by others as they see themselves. But, you know, it's
very reasonable that someone like Dicky is obviously somebody who's more private and
may be less trusting than others.
Now, it doesn't mean - of course, everybody with their friends is perfectly OK with sharing
information with them. So that's not really diagnostic. Once your friends are - what's
different about Dicky here is how he - his general attitude toward unknown people or other
people. You know, as anyone who's checked out Facebook or things, it's staggering what
people are willing to say about themselves.
CONAN: Well, you can tell things about yourself openly or inadvertently, and you can
figure out how to read them by reading Sam Gosling's new book, "Snoop: What Your Stuff
Says About You." Sam Gosling joined us from the University of Texas at Austin where he's
an associate professor of psychology, and from KUT, our member station there in Austin,
Texas. Thanks very much for being with us today.
Dr. GOSLING: Oh, thank you so much.
CONAN: Coming up, if the latest Indiana Jones movie has you thinking about a career in
archaeology, well, hold onto that fedora. We'll talk with a real archaeologist. He's never
fought off bad guys with a whip, really. Next. That's on Talk of the Nation from NPR News.
I'm Neal Conan. Stay with us.
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Excerpt: 'Snoop: What Your Stuff Says

About You'

by Sam Gosling
May 14, 2008 3:01 PM ET

A FedEx Package awaited me in the mailroom. Nothing much distinguished the box from
other boxes. It was your standard box, brown and about the size of a shoebox, but squarer.
What made this delivery different was the unusual set of instructions that came with it. I
was not to open it until given permission to do so. Just in case I was in doubt, the words
DO NOT OPEN were boldly inscribed in black ink across the top flap. According to

instructions left on my voicemail, at a prearranged time I was to videotape myself opening

the package. So at 3:00 P.M. the next day I took the box to a small room equipped with a
video camera. Once inside, I pointed the camera to the spot where I would be standing and
switched it on. I moved into view of the camera lens and pulled a small scrap of paper from
my pocket. There was a number scribbled on the paper. I punched it into my cell phone.
"This is Dr. Gosling. I'd like to speak to Gary."
"I'll put you through."
A click. Then a pause.
"Gary speaking."
"It's Sam here. I'm ready."
"Go ahead and open it up."
Free at last to exercise my Pandoran urges, I slit the box open. "Inside you will see some
things belonging to one person," said Gary. "They're all taken from that person's bathroom."
(I noticed he was careful not to say his or her). "Take the objects out one by one," he
continued, "and tell me what they say about the owner."
As I removed the objects, I turned each one over in my hands. A small tube of skin cream, a
CD, slightly scratched, of dance music, a brown plastic hair brush, and a Polaroid photo of
the owner's sink area. As I inspected each item for clues I narrated my reasoning to the
camera. "Well, the brush is quite large, probably belonging to a man." My theory was
supported by the Polaroid photo, which showed a sink area with the surrounding surfaces
generally devoid of sweet-smelling stuff and with levels of grime and (dis)organization
more likely to be associated with males than females. I noted that the hairs trapped on the
brush were short, straight, and dark. Perhaps the person was Asian or Hispanic. The photo
showed that the door on the bathroom vanity wasn't closed properly and the hairdryer cord
was hanging out; the tube of skin cream had been squeezed in the middle, not from the end,
and some crusty residue was stuck to the cap. The CD was a compilation of house music, a
genre stereotypically associated with gay clubs. Combine that with the evidence that the
person is concerned with his (I'm now pretty sure the owner is a male) appearance and a
coherent picture begins to emerge.
After a few minutes, Gary asked: "So, what can you tell me about the owner of these
items?" On the basis of what I'd inspected, I said I believed the owner was an Asian male in
his mid to late twenties and that he was quite possibly gay. I had underestimated his age by
a few yearshe was in his early thirtiesbut I was right about the rest. Gary seemed
pleased.
What was going on here? What was I doing talking to this faceless voice under such strange
circumstances? And why should I, of all people, have anything useful to tell him?

The mysterious caller was a television producer planning a new reality series that would
deal with the familiar, almost irresistible, human urge to snoop. If you're anything like me,
you do more than passively observe the surroundings when you enter someone's living
space for the first time. I find it hard not to look around and collect, filter, and process
information about the occupant. Would I be so kind as to excuse the host while she goes to
the bathroom? Absolutely! She's gone. Right. Hightail it over to the bookcase. Scan the
books. A guidebook to budget travel in Madagascar. A tiny gift edition of Virginia Woolf's
A Room of One's Own. Interesting. Now the photos. Hmm, all but one show my host with a
big group of friends, and each picture projects an image of drunken hilarity. No time to
dwell, I just heard the toilet flush and there are still the CDs, the trash basket, and that pile
of junk on the windowsill. And all this is before I've had a chance to snoop through her
medicine cabinet . . . I mean, kindly be excused to powder my nose. (Medicine cabinets are
such quintessential snooping sites that I've often thought it would be fun to surprise
snoopers with a "visitors' book" inside.)
The television producers were taking this common snooping impulse to its logical endpoint:
What can a physical space tell you about someone you have never met or even seen? The
vision for the programunlike MTV's popular show Room Raidersincluded a role for an
expert who would provide insight into the snooping process.
Why were the producers talking to me? I am a professor of psychology at the University of
Texas, and I specialize in the study of personality differences and how people form
impressions of others in daily life. My research focuses on the same question driving the
television program: how people's possessions can tell us even more about their personalities
than face-to-face meetings or, sometimes, what their best friends say about them. Indeed,
my first study on this topic, which I conducted when I was still a graduate student at UC
Berkeley, was the scientific equivalent of what the producers had in mind for their show.
The study examined what observers could learn about men and women they had never met
purely on the basis of snooping around their bedrooms.
The "bedroom study," as it came to be called, yielded fascinating findings in its own right
(more about these later), and, to my surprise, the research and the ideas underlying it
sparked significant interest beyond the halls of academe. Although other psychologists have
looked at personality impressions based on small snippets of information, like video clips
or short interactions, no one had examined rooms before. And no one had come up with
such a rich bounty of information. The media reported our results with obvious glee. They
gave their stories headlines such as "Object Lessons," "Behind Enemy Lines," and "Room
with a Cue." One journalist dubbed me Snooper-in-Chief.
I continued my research in graduate school and have developed it further since taking up
my post at the University of Texas in 1999. My graduate students and I have conducted
many studies on personality in everyday life: We've peeked under beds and peered into
closets; we've riffled through music collections; we've scrutinized Facebook profiles. We've
visited a whole bunch of dorm rooms (eighty-three to be exact) and nearly a hundred
offices in banks, real estate firms, business schools, advertising agencies, and architecture
studios. And we've examined how people reveal their personalities in such ordinary

contexts as their Web pages, their books, the words they use in casual conversation, and
where they live.
In the years we've been doing this research my teammates and I have learned to be super
snoopers; we have trained our eyes to exploit clues that will tell us what a person is really
like. Did the Virginia Woolf volume mean that my friend was an ardent feminist? Or
perhaps the book was merely one of many she was assigned for a course on British
literature. Did the photos of drunken hilarity mean she was using alcohol as an escape? Or
was she just a party girl? Some ten years into the research, we'd assembled an enormous
amount of information, much of it unexpected, all of it valuable in showing how people
portray and betray their personalities.
So perhaps the television people were on the mark. Maybe I could say something useful
about this topic.

Snoop: An Investigation into Possessions, Perceptions, Projections

and Personalities

Sam Gosling's new book - Snoop: What Your Stuff Says

About You - blends an engaging and accessible overview of some of the key concepts and
research findings in personality psychology and environmental psychology with what
amounts to a collection of short detective stories. Snoopology, the art and science of
determining "which of your tastes and habits provide particular portals into your
personality", attempts to differentiate what our stuff really says about us from what most
people might think our stuff says about us.
A snoopologist looks for three basic types of clues to personality - one's "unique pattern of
thinking, feeling and behaving that is consistent over time" - in the personal spaces (e.g.,
bedrooms and bathrooms in the home, and offices or cubicles at work) that we inhabit:

identity claims: posters, awards, photos, trinkets and other mementos that make
deliberate symbolic statements about how we see ourselves that can be for our
benefit (self-directed identity claims) or intended for others (other-directed identity
claims)
feeling regulators: family photos, keepsakes, music, books and videos that help us
manage our emotions and thoughts
behavior residue: the physical traces left in the environment by our everyday
actions (e.g., objects on our desks, on our floors or in our garbage)

The "big five" personality traits, which I first encountered (and wrote about) in the context
of YouJustGetMe, a web site for guessing these traits (and an associated ICWSM 2008
paper on which Sam was co-author), are here enumerated along with well-known icons
who exemplify these traits:

Openness: Leonardo da Vinci; creative, imaginative, abstract, curious, deep

thinkers, inventive and value arts and aesthetic experiences.
Conscientiousness: RoboCop; thorough, dependable, reliable, hard-working, taskfocused, efficient, good planners.
Extraversion: Axel Foley (Beverly Hills Cop); talkative, energetic, enthusiastic,
assertive, outgoing, sociable.
Agreeableness: Fred Rogers; helpful, selfless, sympathetic, kind, forgiving,
trusting, considerate, cooperative.
Neuroticism: Woody Allen; anxious, easily ruffled or upset, worried, moody.

In exploring what it really means to know someone, Sam reviews some of the work by Dan
McAdams, including McAdams' book, The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the
Making of the Self, which describes three levels of intimacy:

traits: the "big five" dimensions of personality listed above

personal concerns: roles, goals, skills and values
identity: the thread that ties the experiences of our past, present and future into one
narrative

In discussing these levels of intimacy, Sam notes that Arthur Aron has developed a twoperson "sharing game" consisting of a sequence of 36 questions that slowly escalate the
level of disclosure between two people, enabling them to progress from the first to the
second level of intimacy. Unfortunately, the sharing game does not appear to be available
online (though a journal paper describing the system is available for a fee),
The "sharing game" reminds me of OneKeyAway, a dating service that adds some new
twists to "lock-and-key" parties, in which women are given locks and men are given keys both worn on lanyards around their necks - and prizes are awarded to couples who find
matching locks and keys, offering incentives to both easily engage and disengage
throughout the course of a party. I've written an entire blog post about lock-and-key parties
and OneKeyAway; here I'll simply note a few relevant items. OneKeyAway introduces two
interesting dimensions: a 64-question online questionnaire, which covers topics such as
relationship expectations, emotional responsiveness, personal behaviors and habits,
hobbies, sexual orientation and preferences, religion and substance; and a MatchLinC
keyfob-like device that encodes those responses and is handed out at an event. Participants
can "zap" each other - point their MatchLinCs at each other and press a button (vs. inserting
a key in a lock), and a red, amber or green light on the device signals their relative
compatibility. Couples can, of course, strike up a conversation whether the devices say they
are compatible or incompatible (both of which are potentially interesting conversation
topics if they find each other attractive). The real power is in the questionnaire, which
primes the participants to delve into topic areas that are more likely to lead to progressive
disclosure and increasing levels of intimacy.
I don't know whether music is one of the topics in the OneKeyAway questionnaire, but it
does frequently rank among the topics that appears to be most conducive to enabling people

to connect with and relate to each other. Summarizing a number of related psychological
experiments, Sam observes that
music consistently trumps books, clothing, food, memories and television shows in helping
people get to know each other.
Elsewhere in the book, he notes that
Web sites are extraordinarily good places to learn about people - perhaps the best of all
places.

The book includes a handy table

(shown right) to indicate just how well we can really learn about people's personality traits
through different channels.
These, in turn, reminded me of some earlier ruminations about music and personality, that
were inspired by earlier encounters with the work of Sam and his colleagues, and gives me
renewed hope that we'll be able to effectively transmute Strands' early core competencies in
music recommendation into broader and deeper recommendations that help people discover
and enjoy other people, places and things around them (an explicit part of our minimanifesto for Strands Labs, Seattle).
The sharing game, OneKeyAway and talking about music preferences can help people
move from traits to personal concerns, but to really enable people to know each other at the
deeper level of identity, McAdams says we have to set the stage for the telling of a story ...
their story: "an inner story of the self that integrates the reconstructed past, perceived
present and anticipated future to provide a life with unity, purpose and meaning". This
dimension reminds me of my experience in The Mankind Project, where we regularly seek
to differentiate data, judgments, feelings and wants. One of the tools we use to do this is
careful use of language, or as we like to put it, clear, direct, concise and truthful (CDCT)
communication. We often preface our remarks with "the story I make up about X" to help
us remember that the judgments we have about people - others and ourselves - typically
take the form of narratives we construct based on relatively sparse data, filled in with a

multitude of judgments, in our relentless effort to make sense of the world. We also
emphasize the use of "I" statements - which is consistent with the findings of James
Pennebaker reported in the book that a person's use of first-person pronouns is correlated
with honesty (and, interestingly, complex thinking).

Returning to the topic of making

sense of people, Gosling reports that the famous Rorschach ink-blot test, in which people
describe what they see in ink-blot patterns, is actually not very helpful in assessing
personality. A more helpful test is the Picture Story Exercise (PSE) - or Thematic
Apperception Test (TAT) - in which people make up a spontaneous story about a random
series of pictures, revealing repressed aspects of their personality, especially their
motivations and needs for achievement, affiliation and power. Personality seepage can also
be effectively captured and analyzed through body movements such as jumping, walking
and dancing. Wryly noting that "we sometimes say more with our hips than with our lips",
Sam reports on a study by Karl Grammer, at the Ludwig-Boltzmann Institute for Urban
Ethology, in which analysis of videotapes and interviews conducted in nightclubs showed
that the tightness of a woman's clothing, the amount of skin it reveals, and the
"explosiveness" of her movement on the dance floor are all correlated to estrogen levels
(indicating fertility, and thus, attractiveness, evolutionarily speaking).
Of course, physiological components of attractiveness are often combined with - or covered
up or compensated by - other, more deceptive, dimensions of the outer layers of appearance
and behavior we project. This reminds me of some of Judith Donath's insights into the
application of signaling theory to social networks, in which she distinguishes among the
relative costs and benefits of handicap signals, index signals and conventional signals, and
explores how fashion is largely a manifestation of the latter, relatively inexpensive, type of
signal.
Fortunately, however, for those of us who are concerned or obsessed with authenticity, Sam
claims that our behavioral residue is difficult to consciously manipulate, and underneath
whatever appearances we may try to cultivate, our real personalities persistently try to
express themselves. This is corroborated by experimental results from Self-Verification
Theory, which suggests that people want to be seen as they really are (or at least as they see
themselves), even if that means that "negative" aspects of their personalities are seen.

One of the more controversial chapters in the book addresses the issue of stereotypes.
Given that we can only perceive narrow aspects of others' personalities, we naturally tend
to fill in the gaps of the stories we make up about them with information based on our
perceptions others who we judge similar, based on gender, race, or where they live (e.g.,
with respect to red states and blue states). Unfortunately, for those of politically correct
persuasion, many of these stereotypes do have at least a kernel of truth. For example,
women tend to score higher in the Big Five trait of neuroticism than men, i.e., they tend to
be more anxious, less even-tempered, less laid-back, more emotional and more easily
stressed tan men, and it turns out that, generally speaking, conservatives are "neurologically
more resistant to change" and liberals are more extroverted.

And music stereotypes turn out to be

very helpful in forming correct impressions of people, although not all music genres are
created equal, with respect to the personality traits their fans inadvertently reveal. For
example, affinity for Contemporary Religious music turns out to be much more revealing
about personality, values and alcohol and drug use than a love of Soul music or, more
surprisingly to me, Rap.
Another dimension that reveals aspects of our personalities is hoarding. Sam notes that we
have "an ingrained instinct to collect stuff" (which may be why Amy Jo Kim includes

"collections" as one of the five key elements of what makes online games - and online
social networking - so addictive). He shares a definition of hoarding as "the repetitive
collection of excessive quantities of poorly usable items of little or no value with failure to
discard those items over time". With the caveat that "little or no value" is a rather subjective
label, I must admit that I tend to hoard books, academic papers and wines. This, in turn,
leads to a discussion of what our workspaces say about us ... but I'm going to hold off
saying more about that (for now) ... I've been composing this blog in bits and pieces for
over a month now, and I want to wrap it up (and if anyone has actually read this far, you
may be thinking the same thing). [In fact, given the change in default formatting that
TypePad has instituted in the interim, this blog post didn't even get assigned a usable URL,
so I've had to repost it :-(]
However, before closing, I will note that in the "What Counts?" column of the May 2008
issue of Conscious Choice, a few interesting statistics - from a TreeHugger article on
"Spring Cleaning: '101 Reasons to Get Rid Of It'" - are listed:

1.4 Million: Americans who suffer from hoarding or clutter.

80: Percentage of things Americans own that they never use.

Unfortunately, it's not clear what proportion of the 1.4 million sufferers are the actual
hoarders and how many are family, friends and/or coworkers of the hoarders ... for
example, I think my wife suffers much more from my hoarding than I do.
Just to come [nearly] full circle again, the issue starts out with a letter from the editor
entitled Fire and Rain, that talks about the way that music influences us,
I cant help but pay special attention to the songs that randomly pop into my head. ... Music
has the magical ability to transport and transform us in ways that impress me on a daily
basis.
I've just finished - and plan to write another long blog post about - another fabulous book:
This is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, by Daniel Levitin ... in
which he talks about how and why some music gets stuck in our heads ... and a variety
other aspects of our obsession with music ... and which offers an interesting complement to
some of the insights that Sam shares in his book.
Returning to Sam's book, one issue that came up repeatedly (for me) throughout the book
was the difference between what our words and actions really say about us, and how others
generally interpret what our words and actions say about us. Sam notes a number of
scientific experiments that have shown that we often make mistaken assumptions about
people. But if most people make the same inferences - however mistaken - about others,
won't this have an effect on their interactions with them ... and eventually, on their
personalities? As Sam notes in the book:
Attractive people may be treated differently in social interaction, a phenomena that actually
leads to differences in how they behave and how they seem themselves.

Theodor Adorno noted a similar phenomena in his 1951 book, Minima Moralia: Reflections
from a Damaged Life (which I read about in a recent Wall Street Journal book review,
Capitalism and its Malcontent):
The sound of any woman's voice on the telephone tells us whether the speaker is attractive.
It reflects back as self-confidence, natural ease and self-attention all the admiring and
desirous glances she has ever received.
So if others' assumptions about us affects their behavior toward us, and their behavior
affects our behavior, and our behavior over time affects our personalities, won't others'
assumptions - however erroneous - affect our personalities? Do we tend to become more of
the people others' see us as? I'm reminded of the lyrics from a Lyle Lovett song: "If I were
the man that you wanted, I would not be the man that I am" ... but I digress...
I don't mean to say that personality and social psychology does not yield many interesting
interesting insights - indeed, Sam's book is one of the most interesting books I've ever read
- I just wonder how much impact these insights will have on society. How much does what
our behavior really mean matter, in comparison to how others interpret our behavior (and
its residue)? Should we be doing more scientific experiments or conducting more polls?
Would we rather be right or happy (or popular)?
Of course, if snoopology catches on, perhaps more of us can be right, happy and popular about and with each other.