Sam Gosling

It's important to note that the subtitle of this book reads, 'What your stuff says about you.' Which isn't exactly what the book is about - it's really about how behaviour intersects with personality. To the extent that the acquisition of goods, and how you relate to them, is about 'stuff' then yes. But it's your behaviours and choices, driven by your personality, that bring the stuff to you (or you to it) and dictates how you 'keep' it (tidy or messy, showy or hidden). Gosling doesn't miss show more this point, the interior of his book is very largely made up of theories of personality and behaviour - so much so that many reviewers have complained it's not about 'stuff' at all

Which goes to show that you shouldn't judge a book by its subtitle. Usually it's the case that the publisher has foisted it on the author, but in this case I think Gosling has to take the rap. Because in addition to being a serious professor who can't avoid tackling the real issues he's raising, he is a person who likes snooping, and I mean intrusively snooping where most of us would have drawn the line several yards back along. There's a serious aspect to this when you use it to validate psychological testing methods - for instance secretly filming subjects arriving to fill in a written psychological test and cross-correlating their 'body language' with the results from the test. But it is very dangerous ground, both ethically and logically.

As I started reading I got the impression that this was an essay masquerading as a book, but at the end I realized it was more like a thirteen week series of lectures built around an entertaining, but ultimately not-really-central theme. As psychology, and even as a case study in ethics, it is a challenging book, by which I mean to suggest that it is thought provoking even if you (as I did) disagree with much of what he's done with these ideas. If Gosling had been a professor of forensic science this might have been a much more tightly focussed book, and perhaps he should look for a co-author from that field for his inevitable follow-up best seller.

I'll forgive Gosling most of his assertions and glosses, however, for this one point that he does try to hammer home - most of what you think you understand about a person from what you observe about them is not true, and the fault lies with how you assemble your understanding of them. Essentially it's a caution about prejudices and an argument for making the effort to reach a deeper understanding. But not, and I repeat not, by going through their medicine cabinet while they're not looking. That, I'm afraid, says more about the person who is violating someone else's privacy, than it does about the person being snooped upon. And he does talk about the ethical way of going about 'getting to know someone', but he never seems to quite get the point that some things are - and ought to remain - private. show less

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 show more 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. show less

I forget exactly where I heard about this book. I suspect it was either on The Happiness Project blog or the Non-Consumer Advocate blog. Either way I read about it, looked it up, and heady with the power of Lansing library's website, immediately placed a hold on a copy and was able to go pick it up a few days later. I love my new library!

Anyway, the book's subtitle is a tiny bit misleading. Of course you could read this book and figure out what other people might think of your stuff, but a show more more accurate subtitle would be "What you can figure out about other people by snooping through their stuff." I know, not quite as concise, is it?

What I found most interesting in this book were the kinds of conclusions people jump to in judging other people and which ones have a tendency to be correct and which are worthless. Like how people place too much importance on the face-to-face interview in hiring and admissions. Also interesting were the average personality differences between people in different parts of the country or of different political orientations. And the difference between decorations/possessions as outward-focused identity claims versus self-directed emotional regulators.

This was a diverting pop-psychology read. I certainly learned some things. I am glad, though, that I checked it out and didn't run right out and buy it. I don't know exactly what I was looking for in this book, but this ended up feeling just a little... light. show less

This is a brilliantly fascinating book about how personality is expressed through our environments and preferences. What do our bedrooms say about us, not just through the things we control but through the unconscious trails we leave? How about our office desks? What can you learn about someone from their books or music collection? It is very interesting, very well-researched, and throws everyday existence and our natural need to develop quick perceptions of others into a whole new light.