Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

a principle called anchoring, meaning that the first information we encounter has an unduly large influence on what follows.

When I asked Wu about the difference between pathological hoarding and ordinary collecting, he shared this important observation with me: Collectors enjoy their collections. It gives them pleasure to collect and they savor their collections. Hoarders, on the other hand, find their situation distressing.

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

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

What is it, in concrete terms, that we know after a thousand days of knowing someone that we did not know on day one? McAdams provides a good answer to this question. Getting to know someone, he says, means progressing through three distinct levels of intimacy.

Our studies have shown that novice snoopers usually think that invitingness betrays high agreeableness, high conscientiousness, low neuroticism, high openness, and high extraversion. As a super snooper, you know that it signals extraversion only.

In his great work The Characters, Theophrastus sketched thirty types—from the penurious and the garrulous to the flatterer and the shamelessly greedy—and illustrated his character portraits with an astonishing level of detail.

the interviewees who spent more time talking, who gestured a lot, and who dressed more formally were judged to be higher on both social skills and work motivation.

Self-Verification Theory—suggests that such a desire is not always true. It suggests that we would prefer to be seen as we see ourselves, regardless of whether those self-views are positive or negative.