Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

One projective test that has gained support from researchers, however, is the Picture Story Exercise (or PSE), which has been used in research for more than fifty years. It requires the person being assessed to tell a story about a series of pictures. The psychologist uses the drama the person creates—and the wishes, thoughts, and feelings of the c

traits provide “a psychology of the stranger.” They paint a portrait in broad brushstrokes but leave out much of the finer detail.

living spaces are great for learning about openness, conscientiousness, and, sometimes, neuroticism; but if it’s people’s extraversion or agreeableness you’re after, a peek at the “most played” list on their iPods is more telling

Peruvians even have the concept of hora peruana, or Peruvian time, which translates to about an hour late. So lax is Peruvian punctuality that its government promoted a campaign—la hora sin demora or “time without delay”—to improve the nation’s reputation.

consider one useful definition of personality: An individual’s unique pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving that is consistent over time.

Pennebaker has found that when people are telling the truth, they tend to use a relatively high frequency of first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) and exclusive words (such as but, except, and without), which tend to mark complex thinking. So, when explaining something honestly, they are more likely to “own” it by making it more personal and d

Dan McAdams. He’s a brilliant and exceptionally creative professor at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy and the author of the influential book The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self.

Mess meister Eric Abrahamson notes that when analyzing the state of a desk it is important to consider that two forces are at work—those that produce the mess, such as working toward a brutal deadline, and those that reduce it, such as tidying up. So your desk could be clear either because you’ve cleaned it up or because so little goes on that it n

Schultheiss’s research also showed that people high on these story-based measures of power respond poorly to defeat in a competitive game. They secrete high levels of cortisol, a hormone associated with stress. But people low on this motive for power are actually more stressed out by winning!

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