Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

Expertise plays a crucial role in a judge’s ability to figure out what someone is like. When I look through a woman’s apartment and find a tube of lipstick, I see a tube of lipstick. Many women looking at the same evidence would see a tube of MAC lipstick, or Cover-girl lipstick, or . . .

Unlike my colleague, Charles Gibson is not dismissive of order. As I began to piece together a sharper picture of him, I realized that he seems to have an “I really must get around to that” personality—that is, his actions typically lag behind his good intentions.

This general snooping strategy—contrasting the easy-to-control items (which tend to be identity claims and feeling regulators) with things that are difficult to control (which tend to be behavioral residue)—captures many of the specific examples we have examined so far, such as comparing front and back yards, or offices and bedrooms, or books on th

But there are also important differences between living and working spaces. As with bedrooms, our snoopers thought decorated offices were occupied by extraverts, but unlike in bedrooms—where level of decoration was a false clue—in offices it really did mark the extraverts. In offices (but not bedrooms), invitingness also signals extraversion—extrav

Introverts tend to display fewer depictions of people. They go for a quiet landscape or a still life. If introverts do display portraits, they are often of calm, restful people.

We can use the concept of an “aspired self” to help distinguish those who are disorganized but wish they weren’t from those disorganized folks who are not bothered by it.

across domains openness is easier to spot than agreeableness.

if you are trying to discover how the person wants to be seen, you should choose items that are both controllable and public. Web site profiles and bumper stickers are good examples. But if you are concerned that your snoopee is trying to dupe you, then you’ll want to compare the messages sent by the items known to be public with those believed to

Barz—he’s a snacker. But he doesn’t hunger for food. He hungers for connection with his family. The photos are social snacks that tides him over until he can reconnect with his loved ones in person. Wendi Gardner, a professor at Northwestern University, has studied social snacking and has provided compelling evidence to suggest that these psycholog