Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
We're very happy to welcome Sam Gosling to the Inkwell for a discussion of
his book, "Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You".

Sam Gosling is an associate professor of psychology at the University
of Texas. Born in London and raised in Gloucestershire, he now lives
in Austin. He did his graduate work in Psychology at the University
of California at Berkeley, where he began his two core lines of
research: Personality in non-human animals and the topic of Snoop,
how personality is expressed and perceived in everyday environments.
He was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences and he is the recipient of the American Psychological
Association's Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career
Contribution. Please visit him at http://snoopology.com/ .

Leading the conversation with Sam is the Well's own David Adam Edelstein.

David Adam Edelstein is a software designer and street photographer
and spends most of his time trying to wrap his head around what's going
on in other people's heads.  He's delighted to find out there's a word
for it, besides "that creepy guy looking at my shoes on the bus."

Welcome, Sam and David!
  

    
Thanks, Dana.

Sam, this book was a heck of a lot of fun to read. It's given some
focus to my normal nosy behavior -- or my normal snooping behavior, I
guess.

I think we should start with a definition of terms here -- how do you
explain the idea of snooping to someone who doesn't know your work?
  

    
That's a great question David because a big part of snooping is normal
nosy behavior. But two things set it apart from ordinary everyday
nosiness. 

First, snooping is based on empirical research; we jump to many
conclusions about people on the basis of their living spaces or music
collections or facebook profiles, but only some of those are right. So
we need to check out the research on the topic to evaluate our
intuitions. 

Second, and most important, when snooping our normal natural nosiness
is structured by an understanding of how we humans are connected to our
physical spaces from a psychological perspective. Our physical spaces
do a whole lot more than provide protection, shelter, and privacy; they
also serve psychological functions like expressing ourselves and
making us feel a certain way. Many (most even) objects owe their
presence in our space to these psychological functions. And virtually
all these links to our spaces are driven by processes that are so
natural and automatic that we don't normally think about them. We don't
think, "oh, that photo is going to be useful in making a self-directed
identity claim," we think, "I like that photo. I should put it up
somewhere."

So the first step in snooping is thinking about our own spaces. How do
we connect to these environments that we have selected and crafted
around ourselves?
  

    
(NOTE: Offsite readers with questions or comments may have them
 added to the conversation by emailing <inkwell@well.com> -- please
 put the author's name in the subject line. Thank you!)
  

    
Sam, I really enjoyed reading your book as well.  As a usability
engineer and software product designer, I'm always trying to figure out
what/how people are thinking and I'm sure I'll be taking some of you
lessons to heart when next out visiting our customers' offices.  You've
added more tools to my Contextual Inquiry kit.
  

    

Must. Read. This. Book!
  

    
Reading Snoop definitely got me thinking about my own spaces, both at
home and at work. Looking at my office, my first response was that so
many of the things here are dropped at random -- a couple of stacks of
sticky notes, a ruler, a napkin or two from the kitchen -- that it
would be hard to figure out anything about me from them. 

Of course further along you explained that the very fact of my having
things dropped at random is a clue to my personality.  Uh oh.

I'm interested in the idea of people having dual spaces, though.  I of
necessity filter what's in my office versus what's at home.  Do you
find that you learn less from that kind of a relatively public space?
Or do you just learn different things?
  

    
David, I've had similar thoughts about my office vs home space.   What
is my space saying about me?  I know that I put more thought in to
what's in my office at work vs. my office at home.  This is mainly
because very few people see my home office, whereas my space at work is
seen by colleagues and upper management.  The office is where I put on
my professional mask, and I've actually thought a bit about whether to
put out awards of recognition, what poster is on the wall, which
(usability related) Dilbert cartoon is on my window, etc.

What I do wonder, however, is what impression those artifacts leave on
my visitors.
  

    
When I was in high school many moons ago, I was obsessed by defining a person by their 
bookshelf-- see their bookshelf, know the person.

I even proposed a video/film on that topic for a class I was taking, and while it ended up not 
getting made-- I'm still very interested by it.

Will be getting this out of the library (alas, my bookshelves are stuffed-- what does that say 
about me?)  

In the meantime, wondering if the conversation extends to the game  of "If you were a 
dog/shoe/motorboat/whatever/, which one would you be?"  and "Cast Winnie the Pooh/ the Wizard 
of Oz  among your friends."
  

    

Is this book only available in the US?
  

    
Great Questions. They raise so many points (must be careful not to
write another whole book in response). Let's take a stab at a couple:

1. The issue of how different contexts (like home vs. office)
constrain how we might express ourselves has parallels in real life. In
the field of personality, we use the term "strong situations" to refer
to situations where we are constrained in how much our personalities
have an opportunity to leak out. Good examples of strong situations
would  if you're at a funeral or a wedding or in a library or in the
army, where your behavior is constrained to different degrees, limiting
the extent to which your personality can express itself. The same
thing happens with how we might express ourselves in our physical
environments too. In a professional context, the situation might
dictate that it's not an ideal place to share your views on drug
legalization. Of course, the norms can work in both directions; they
don't always drive occupants to suppress traits. In one of our studies
we examined office spaces in various sectors; when we got to the
advertising agency there was clearly huge pressure for all the
occupants to make a big show about how creative they were. 

What this means when you're snooping around people's spaces is that
it's CRUCIAL to get an idea of the local display norms. When you go
into an office/cubicle space be sure to check out other spaces within
that building/industry; it's only then that you'll be able to interpret
whether, for example, the lack of decor reflects the occupant's
preferences or company policies/norms. More broadly, keep an eye on
whether you're looking at a strong or weak situation--as a rule, you'll
learn more about personality in weak situations [there are, of course,
some interesting exceptions].

2. Quite often people will make points along the lines of those made
by David and Jessica--that their office and home spaces are quite
different. When we begin to think about the connections between people
and their spaces, this is not altogether surprising. The core point of
my book is to show how our physical spaces are reflections our
behaviors, values, attitudes, and identities. When at work (vs. home)
we often engage in different behaviors (filing vs. gardening), think
about different things (accounts vs. why there are cat hairs on the
curtains), and express different identities (me-the-lawyer vs.
me-the-lover) and we would expect these characteristics to be
differently reflected in the different spaces. So it tells us something
useful about your different selves to look at both spaces. But see
point 3.

3. Having said all that, it's important to be aware of a perceptual
bias: We are particularly inclined to notice subtle differences between
our own spaces. To you it may seem like your office is MUCH neater
than your home. And there may be some truth to this view but typically
the differences between Harry at work and Harry at home are dwarfed by
the differences between Harry at work and Jane at work (or between
Harry at home and Wallace at home).

4. IADWM: Our research confirms your hunch--books and other
preferences (like music) can be very revealing about an individual. 

Elisabeth: The book is available or soon will be in quite a few
countries. Can you be more specific?
  

    

I'm in Stockholm and v. interested.

I'm going shopping today so I'll stop at the Akademibokhandeln and enquire.
  

    
Hi Sam.  I haven't read your book, but from the discussion so far, it
sounds like you are doing before-the-fact archeology. Facinating.

When you were doing the research, and you did your thinking about how
you would analyze the data, did you ever consider talking to some
archeologists?

I suggest you get in contact with my old professor at the University
of Michigan, Henry T. Wright.  Henry is a deep thinker and the way his
mind works, he may be a good person to talk to.  There aren't many
geniuses around and Henry was a MacArthur Fellow. 
  

    
The distinction between strong and weak situations is interesting.  It
seems like there's something interesting to be learned from someone's
response to a strong situation, as well -- what someone thinks is
appropriate behavior for a funeral, for example.
  

    
Wow.  Henry Wright was one of my professors at the University of
Michigan too.  I agree he would be a good person to talk to.  

As a cultural anthropologist myself who has read this book, my initial
reaction to the ideas of "strong" and "weak" situations would be that
strong situations indicate a lot of cultural constraint.  In our
culture one way we think about culture is the idea that it constrains
us -- it's the "formal" stuff of life -- and that when we let up on
that constraint, our true individual selves can come out.

But this isn't really entirely what I believe.  The book brings up,
for example, the significance of music in the lives of young people. 
In Facebook and MySpace, or even in a Blogger profile, a young person's
choice of music is extremely significant.  As in, "no I couldn't
possibly hook up with someone who liked THAT."  Certainly personality
influences the music someone would put in their profile.  But the
meaning of the music is totally dependent on the microculture that the
music comes out of and helps to define.  It is already a social
statement that signifies more than "pure" personality.  And it's a
choice which has its place in "weak" situations of leisure. 

So personality and culture are interwoven.  Which is pretty much what
Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead actually thought back in the 1930s, but
that's a whole other thing.  
  

    
Okay, I'll admit it: as I read this book, I find myself becoming more and
more self-conscious about what I'm wearing, what I'm listening to, what my
home looks like...

Does knowing more about these things make it easier for us to adjust our
self-presentation? Or is the whole point that at some point, the "truth," or
some version of it anyway, will inevitably out?
  

    
Yes, I think this work has a lot in common with archeology. In both
cases we are interested in figuring out what people are telling
us--deliberately and inadvertently--from the stuff that is left in
their wake. In Snoop I talk about the work of William Rathje, founder
of the "Garbage Project," which was very explicitly based on the
principles of architecture; he observed that archaeologists go through
ancient garbage to find out what was done in the past so why can't we
go through modern garbage to find out what's being done now? 

WRT strong and weak situations, we can learn about people in some very
strong situations. In fact, the tradition of situational tests in
assessment centers was based on the idea that personality emerges in
critical situations. One of the forerunners to modern assessment
centers was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was set up to
identify candidates suitable for work behind enemy lines. There,
assessors would observe behavior across a range of standardized
critical incidents such as getting a team of people across a small
river, trying to organize the construction of a building by two
deliberately unhelpful helpers, responding to a stressful interview,
etc. It was in these moments that people were meant to reveal their
true selves. 

I'd also like to pick up on this issue of the extent to which we can
adjust our self-presentation strategies. Clearly there is some room for
flexibility--we can alter our behaviors and environments when the need
arises. But the flexibility possible, especially in physical spaces,
is limited by a number of constraints. First, it's hard to really
change one's behaviors over the long term, which makes it very hard to
maintain a false image in a physical space. If I was to be interviewed
I could easily just say I was organized, broad minded, and outgoing and
that's all that would be needed. But it would be incredibly difficult
to express those trait convincingly in a physical space if I wasn't
really like that. I remember once getting fed up with never being able
to find the right CD when I wanted it so I decided to get my act
together and become an organized person. I got some great CD drawers
from Ikea, put all the cds back in their cases, sorted the cds by
genre, put them in the drawers in alphabetical order, labeled the
drawers and felt very pleased with myself. But, of course, the
organization (and the smugness) didn't last long because on a
day-to-day basis, I just didn't have the discipline to put things back
in their correct places when I was done with them. Very soon I was back
to chaos because having the space of a genuinely organized person
requires the kind of persistent organizational behavior that I couldn't
consistently muster. 

Another reason that we cannot just project any persona we want is that
our personalities affect how we perceive the world. People high on
neuroticism live in a world full of threats--the car screeching its
brakes two blocks away startles an anxious person but goes unnoticed by
a calm person. I have a colleague who wouldn't even be able to start
work in her office if one of the books had been pulled out of alignment
whereas I wouldn't notice for two weeks if you put half the books in
my bookshelf on their sides. Of course, it's these differences in
perception that contribute to the different behaviors we all do, which
in turn affect the spaces in which we live and work. And these
differences in perception are exceedingly difficult to fake. 

A related issue is that even if we did want to create an entirely
false impression and decided to dedicate the necessary effort to make
it happen it's not clear that we would have the ability to carry it out
because, our  research shows, we are not very good at knowing how we
are viewed by others. For example, in one study of Facebook profiles we
asked profile owners how they thought they were viewed by people who
had only seen their profiles. We then compared what they said, with the
impressions of people who had only seen their profiles. By and large
people were pretty clueless about how they were seen by others. If we
don't know how we're seen by others, it's hard to even begin
manipulating what they think about us. 

So rather than trying to use my findings to project a false identity,
I have stopped fighting it. Instead, I am just having to come to terms
with who I am (though it still drives me CRAZY when I can't find that
damned CD).
  

    
I haven't read the book yet, I will look for it this weekend.  I had
an experience that did get me very interested in this topic, and I've
always wanted to ask an expert about it.  What luck!

I was visiting a friend from work with my young children.  A couple
days later, he brought in a teddy bear in a pink tutu, thinking that my
daughter had left it at his house.  It wasn't my daughter's and he
left it in my office, with a promise to come get it if he figured out
who it belonged to.  I had a fair sized office, with a lot of parts we
had worked on (engineering), books, and personal items.  It fascinated
me how distracting people found the teddy bear, their eyes wandering
back to it again and again.

I noticed that only my most inquisitive employees would ask about it,
and that some interviewees would also.  Meanwhile, other people that
had known me for a decade or more would stare at it, but never ask why
it was there.  A willingness to ask questions is a powerful tool in an
engineering firm, and I came to take asking about the teddy bear as a
good sign in an interview.  Does being an open snoop generally indicate
a more inquisitive nature, or did I hire a lot of people who were
worried that I was very insecure?
  

    
this is fascinating. I must get this book.
  

    
Heh, Sam, I suspect our offices look similar. 

I realized (again looking around my office) that although I'm
disorganized in certain areas (one pile in particular has napkins from
the kitchen, partly used pads of paper, current and outdated documents,
and an empty altoids tin) I'm also very organized in certain areas.
For example, I like to tack up work prints of the current photo series
I'm working on, so I can live with them for a while. Those are neatly
tacked in rows on an otherwise empty corkboard.  

As I typed that I realized that's less revealing about my personal
focus than it might be -- it could indicate that I'm more intentional
about photography than the day job, of course. But I suspect it's
closer to Sam's story about his CDs: Every few weeks I take everything
off of that corkboard, and put new stuff up, and otherwise I don't
physically interact with it at all.  If I did... it would probably tend
towards chaos as well.
  

    
I think what stuff I have around me can also be an indicator of how
chaotic my life is at that time and place.  There are certainly times
when my desk and office are tidy, all the files put away, no old
documents piled up on the back corner of the desk and the shred bin
empty.  On the other hand, there are times when my desk has huge piles
of current and outdated specs, file folders that need to be put away
and an over-flowing shred bin.  It can be months at a time that the
office will be in one of those two states.  So I suppose the question
is how much my office would reveal.  Perhaps that I'm bipolar? (no, not
really)
  

    
That's the usual state of my office also.  When work is slow, or if I
get tired of the mess and can't find something, I CLEAN and organise.
Then when it's fast and furious things just don't stay in one place for
long OR some things stay in THAT pile for a while. I must get to THAT
pile soon but I can't afford to put it out of sight or I'll never get
to THAT pile.

I'd hate for anyone to come into my house though. I work too much and
have to prioritise what little energy I have left so only the most
important things get done. 

I used to work at a place that decided, after I'd been there for a
week or two, that everyone in the open office would not be allowed
personal items on their desks. Everyone grumbled but they were adament.
I had always taken a single rose from home and placed it in a vase on
my desk. My desk was in the middle of the floor where everybody walked
by. After removing all our personal items. I was a bit annoyed when
told I had to remove the rose as well! I was even more startled when
the Union rep came to have a chat with our manager the day after that.
It seems it upset the others in the department when the rose was
removed! And was sort of the last straw that made them get in touch
with union to complain. 

I must also get this book.  

I noticed that you can almost always tell when somebody in a work
place is thinking of leaving also. Their personal stuff starts to
disappear and they stop keeping things like aspirin and snacks and that
extra lipstick in their desk.  I know when I get mad and am thinking
of jumping ship, I'll clean everything out then slowly it creeps back
in as I settle down again. 
  

    
Reading the book I was actually surprised at all the "snooping
fallacies."  I have long thought that nonverbal communication tends to
be more accurate than not, though perhaps often unconsciously.  I have
been, at least in theory, in the "your slip is always showing" school. 
  

But the research in the book shows how fallible our interpretation of
personality cues can be, whether they are based on a person's
appearance or of the space in which they live.  

In particular neurotics seem to have a right to be paranoid.  People
just don't seem to get them right, in any dimension.

(By the way, of the five traits tested in chapter 2 -- openness,
conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism -- I
scored highest in openness, and second highest in both agreeableness
and neuroticism.)

I have more thoughts about neuroticism.  Back when I was a youngster
(I'm younger than McCain), it seemed to me that angst and dark moods
were liberal more than conservative.  It was cool to read Kafka and
Camus, and to watch Bergman films, and this was the Woody Allen era
after all.  This was even true in parts of California, where I grew up
(and live today).

But recently when the research came out identifying liberals as what
William James used to call the healthy-minded, many of my fellow
liberals seemed to be proud of this.  They were happy to correlate
themselves with extroversion.  I remember being puzzled by this while
websurfing parts of the liberal blogosphere, and I wonder if this
represents maybe a real change in eras.  
  

    
Mike's story of the teddy bear in a pink tutu brings up a number of
lessons we learned in our snooping research. Two of them are
particularly important with respect to snooping. 

In our studies, we have often noticed an effect similar to the
bear-in-a-tutu effect, where people come into a space and then find
their attention drawn to a single distinctive object or set of items or
area of the space. In fact, I devote a section in my book to why this
happens and why it's a problem. The bear stuck out in Mike's office
because it was so inconsistent with the other items in it; one can
easily imagine another kind of office--perhaps one, like many I have
seen, with a lot of sentimental items, very feminine decor, other
stuffed animals, etc.--where the bear would go completely unnoticed. Of
course, it makes sense that distinctive items grab our attention
because in our day-to-day lives it's those items that we usually need
to deal with. The problem is that when we are trying to figure out
someone's personality, we are looking for consistent trends, not
outliers in behavior. So as a snooper we should be attending to
evidence of consistent behavior (and, as I mentioned in an earlier
post, that's why spaces tend to be so useful--because they accumulate
evidence of consistent trends). So the very thing that makes the the
teddy-in-a-tutu stick out and grab our attention (the fact that it's
inconsistent with the other items around it) is the very reason why we
should be extremely cautious about interpreting it as a sign of the
occupant's personality. When you are in someone's space its very
difficult to avoid paying special attention to these distinctive items
but you have to force yourself to do so (I don't want to digress too
far, but in my book I talk about a method that an FBI office adopted to
do this). Very often objects that are distinctive have found their way
into the space for a reason that does not reflect the occupant's
personality, very similar to Mike's teddy-in-a-tutu scenario. 

But there are cases where distinctive items do tell you something and
this brings us to the second point I wanted to make with regard to
Mike's post. Sometimes an object is distinctive because they way it has
been positioned in a space--it's deliberately distinctive, not
inadvertently distinctive. That's why when snooping I pay attention not
only to what an object is (a teddy in a tutu) and its state (which
tells you how it has been used), but also its location because that
will often give you clues about the psychological function it serves.
Had the Teddy been carefully placed right next to the computer monitor
alongside photos of spouses and kids etc. I would know that the teddy
was important to Mike. I may not know exactly what the teddy meant but
I would know it was important and if I knew him I would probably ask
him about it. Isn't it cheating to ask him? No, because it is the
snooper's practice of thinking about the space in terms of the
psychological functions the items serve that would direct me to ask
about the things that appear to be important (like the teddy if it were
placed right by the monitor, etc.) and not about the things that
appear to there by accident (like the teddy if it were sitting on some
random shelf). When people read my book they often want to know what
you could learn about someone you had never met from their office or
home. It's a fun exercise but it's not very realistic. Far more often
than snooping around a complete stranger's space, we are in a situation
where we know someone a bit and want to get to know them better. By
using a snooper's eye to figure out where the emotional/meaningful keys
lie, we can direct our questions to get at things we would ordinarily
might not learn for weeks or months, if at all.
  

    
I think Jessica makes an important point in noting that the state of
our spaces also reflects temporary states too (e.g., being very busy in
the run-up to a project deadline). There was a long debate in the
field of social/personality psychology that mirrored Jessica's concern.
The debate centered on the issue of whether behavior is caused by the
situation or the person. For example, if someone is being very quiet is
that because the situation demands it (she's in a  library) or because
that's the kind of person they are (she's an introvert)? Of course,
like most of these debates, the answer ends up being "both". That is,
nearly everyone is quieter in libraries than when at a party (so the
situation is important) but across situations introverts are less
talkative than extroverts (so the person is important). The parallels
to how we should understand physical spaces are clear: when under a
tight deadline with a lot going on at work nearly everyone is messier
than when things are quiet at work, but across time regardless of
whether things are busy or quiet, some people are generally messier
than others. 

The question for the snooper, of course, is trying to distinguish a
mess that's the result of a temporary deadline from a mess that's the
result of a habitually messy person. And that's where the snooper needs
to look at the details of the mess; as Eric Abrahamson in his book,
"The Perfect Mess" has observed, there are many varieties of both
messiness and neatness. A lasting mess that's the result of a
habitually messy person is much deeper in terms of the items that
betray long-lasting underlying chaos (e.g., dusty memos that go WAY
back mixed with old napkins at the lower levels of mess sediment, paper
clips in all kinds of places a self-respecting paper clip should never
go) than the temporary mess that sits in a place that is organized at
deep structural level (e.g., there IS a coherent filing system, the
piles have broad integrity, there is a place for the paper clips). And
there are different kinds of neatness too--two desks could have equally
neat clean desktops but in one the drawers contain well-maintained
desk organizers, sharpened pencils, spare post-it notes, etc. and the
other contains all the junk that was swept off the desktop into the
drawer in a hasty attempt to affect some semblance of order. In
addition to figuring out the particular brand of mess (or neatness), an
expert snooper should also look for other clues to that could help
figure out if the state is temporary or long lasting (e.g., evidence
from the items themselves that there's a project deadline looming). 
  

    
And finally, I wanted to respond briefly to a few other points that
arose in response to my last post. 

I agree with Dodge that there are often clues to a person's job
commitment in the workspace. The more I examine spaces the more I am
struck by how often inner states are reflected in ones physical space.
I'd be interested to hear of any other examples people have noticed. 

And the case Dodge mentioned where the company did not allow employees
to display personal items seems short sighted. Displaying personal
items in one's space can play an important role in helping to manage
how one feels; for example,  Wendi Gardner at Northwestern University
has shown that the social snacks (like the photo of a kid or spouse) we
keep around us at work are important in fending off feelings of
isolation. And by displaying our personal objects we are helping others
get to see us as we see ourselves; when that happens (i.e., when
people feel known) people tend to be happier, healthier, and more
productive. 

Phillip's point about liberals preferring Kafka and
Camus, and Bergman films is consistent with a body of recent research
(mainly by John Jost at NYU) on the psychological underpinnings of
political orientation. One of the key features of conservatism is
resistance to change--conservatives tend to prefer traditions and
traditional values and find the unknown that is associated with change
to be threatening. (The other key psychological feature of conservatism
is tolerance of inequality). Liberals tend to be more comfortable with
change, the unknown, complexity, uncertainty, etc. And those core
psychological differences are reflected in preferences for media, such
as music, films, art, tv, and books, many of which get expressed in our
spaces (like our ipods, Netflix records, and bookshelves).