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Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You By Sam Gosling ( Basic Books )
Release Date: 2008-05-26
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List Price: $25.00
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Product Description
Does what’s on your desk reveal what’s on your mind? Do those pictures on your walls tell true tales about you? And is your favorite outfit about to give you away? For the last ten years psychologist Sam Gosling has been studying how people project (and protect) their inner selves. By exploring our private worlds (desks, bedrooms, even our clothes and our cars), he shows not only how we showcase our personalities in unexpected-and unplanned-ways, but also how we create personality in the first place, communicate it others, and interpret the world around us. Gosling, one of the field’s most innovative researchers, dispatches teams of scientific snoops to poke around dorm rooms and offices, to see what can be learned about people simply from looking at their stuff. What he has discovered is astonishing: when it comes to the most essential components of our personalities-from friendliness to flexibility-the things we own and the way we arrange them often say more about us than even our most intimate conversations. If you know what to look for, you can figure out how reliable a new boyfriend is by peeking into his medicine cabinet or whether an employee is committed to her job by analyzing her cubicle. Bottom line: The insights we gain can boost our understanding of ourselves and sharpen our perceptions of others. Packed with original research and fascinating stories, Snoop is a captivating guidebook to our not-so-secret lives.
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 Best thing since Blink
Few writers can entertain and inform at the same time. Even fewer can back up the informational component with their own empirical research. Sam Gosling is one of those few.
Sam snoops. In your office, your room, or your trash, Gosling digs up diagnostic information about your personality. Not (purely) out of prurience, but out of scientific doggedness, he systematically assembles a personality profile that can be used to predict future behavior.
Unabashedly, Gosling discloses a full range of snooping strategies. And goes on to link them to popular notions of how we make decisions about people. One comes away feeling both guilty and comforted by the fact that we are cluttering up the world with evidence of our passage.
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 Largely Disappointing ( scinanna )
Unfortunately I found this book is be largely repetitive since most of the conclusions became obvious after the first few chapters. It smacked of a research paper padded out to book form.
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 Difficult First Album ( electricray )
I suppose you can't blame Sam Gosling for trying to catch a wave, even if it took him a while to catch it: his variety of psychology - drawing deep psychological conclusions from superficial evidence in the shape of personal detritus in bedrooms and offices and the outward shape of public internet spaces like facebook pages, blogs, websites and the like - was given prominent billing in pop-psych guru Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink as an example of "thin slicing" we do everyday to get by in the world. Gladwell's made a mint; Gosling must have thought he might be able to too.
But just as Gladwell's book - a difficult second album after The Tipping Point - was itself superficial and largely directionless set of anecdotes, Gosling's first effort while promising much, delivers little more than a cursory trot through the "big five" personality traits (which won't be news if you've read Blink), an overarching framework of how these might be signified by "behavioural residue" (being evidence of how you behave left behind when you've stopped behaving and left the room) , "feeling regulators" (photos of your kids, the current Arsenal striker, symbols of your chosen deity and so on positioned around your space to cheer you up) and "identity claimers" (the selfsame items to the extent they are presented to make a statement about you to the rest of the world).
And that's about it. The remainder consists, yet again, of loosely organised anecdotage to bind the one to the other, occasionally leavened with unimpressive statsitics gleaned from half-hearted experiments that Gosling and his underlings have performed. Some of the underwhelming observations you won't find on the dust jacket, then:
* there is very little in an office or bedroom environment which would tell you anything about a person's extraversion, agreeableness or neuroticism (being three of the "big five" traits). The two which you can deduce conclusions are conscientiousness (how tidy you are) and openness (how many African Masks on your walls or albums of World Music in your CD rack). Golly.
* Music tastes are basically useless for gauging personalities for most forms of popular music.
* If you find evidence which appears to contradict your theory about the subject's personality, it is best to ignore it and only look at the evidence which does fit your theory.
Indeed, that's pretty much the problem: Gosling's method purports to be scientific, in the sense of reliably telling you something about a room's inhabitant, but is so liberally sprayed with caveats (those dirty socks might belong to someone else!) as to be little more than an appeal to the sort of intuitions one doesn't need a psychology professor to tell one how to exercise. They're --- well, intuitive.
Indeed, that was Malcolm Gladwell's point: we make these sort of snap judgments automatically and subconsciously, which makes the young Professor Gosling's field guide all the more dispensable.
Olly Buxton
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Slim Pickings ( evelynu )
This is one of those cases where once you hear something, it seems so obvious that you feel like you already knew it. And probably you did. Author Sam Gosling makes a point of telling us that some of our intuitions are incorrect, and that what he's saying isn't all self-evident. But the take-away here just seems pretty thin. He describes various ways of categorizing personality types, and uses a very basic 5-trait personality description for the basis of most of what he says. I expected more of a marketing perspective, but all the action here takes place in dorm rooms, where we find out whether tidy is the same as tidied, and that your taste in music tells pretty much everything a possible mate would want to know about you.
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Good read, though a bit thin ( drewguest )
I enjoyed this book; Gosling is a clear thinker and he provides a accessible overview of interesting personality research. I have seen the results of some of his research in the past, and I admire his creativity and productivity. He is a very talented academic psychologist, and is doing good things for the field. In Snoop, though, he does a nice job of backing off from the strictly scholarly to try and make the work relevant to any curious mind. I found, for example, the discussion of how people use their stuff to make "identity claims" that can be either self-directed or other-directed particularly interesting to think about.
At the same time, I'm not giving the book five stars because it ultimately felt a bit thin in regard to the complexity of human personality. Most of the work discussed is based entirely on the "big 5" personality traits--which Gosling acknowledges are only the surface level of human personality (while he discusses the other levels, such as deeper personal concerns and dynamic narratives of self, they really get short shrift). So at the end of the book I find myself thinking, ok- so I can find some clues, if I triangulate, about whether or not someone is extroverted or conscientious in quirky things such as office pictures or music tastes. But then what does that really tell me that I don't get from just spending time with someone? What really is the whole point of "snooping?" Maybe just that it is kind of fun, and a nice example of an interesting and clearly thought through program of research that has broad appeal. That's probably enough.
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Addiction
