Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

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

Most of us don’t have access to McAdams’s formal method of eliciting information about identity. But, happily, snooping is a good shortcut to this key component of personality because much of our everyday stuff holds clues to identity. As I noted in chapter 1, a good place to find these clues is in the photos of themselves that people choose to dis

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

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

People use other-directed identity claims—like Cindy’s pompoms and the goddess bumper sticker—to signal how they want to be regarded.

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

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

Thinking about stereotypes this way—as assumptions about things (people or objects) in the absence of direct experience of those particular things—allows

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