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 . . .

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

The procedure is based on long-standing research showing that the best way to build a friendship is to escalate self-disclosure gradually, essentially moving through McAdams’s levels. So you should begin with the relatively tame questions—say, “Who would you invite to dinner if you could pick anyone at all?—and take time to work up to the more inte

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

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s classic evocation of life in 1920s Paris,

The Truehome method focuses more on some levels than others in Dan McAdams’s three-tiered system of describing personality. Recall that Level 1 traits, such as sociability and curiosity, are the most superficial. Then as we get to know people better, we learn about their personal concerns (Level 2), and we may even glimpse their identities (Level 3

Of course, most of these calculations are not conscious; we do not actually think a certain person will maximize our genetic prospects, we simply find the person attractive. So a conflict of evolutionary interests underlies the mating game. On one hand we are trying to fool others by appearing as appealing as possible, regardless of the honesty of

Participants with high self-liking scores tended to have usernames to match, such as redhotjenni or princess_suzy. But the participants low on self-liking chose names like sadeyesagain and nothingmuchinside. When Chang-Schneider looked to see whether this was part of a broader pattern, she found that indeed in certain cases—and especially when peop

So when the Berkeley professor asked me what Goffman would say about my research, he was essentially questioning whether the props found in bedrooms and offices, in music collections and on Web pages aren’t just Goffman-esque aids to the roles we play rather than authentic expressions of ourselves.

openness can be judged accurately in many domains;