Sublime

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

One of Borkenau’s most surprising findings is that soft facial lineaments (that is, the contours of the face) are a key to spotting agreeableness; consistent with this result and with some earlier research from the 1980s, he found that a “baby face” look (a round face, large eyes, small nose, high forehead, and small chin) is associated with agreea

This is a sure-fire technique, and it tells you important things about people you can’t learn any other way. A person’s choice of a spouse—or if they aren’t married, their closest lifelong partner—is much more revealing than anything they say or do in public.

This choice tells you about their own

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.

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

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.

Like extraverts, people high on neuroticism have decorated offices, but, as we saw, the content of the decoration is slightly different. Whereas extraverts keep pictures of people around them, those high on neuroticism use decoration, such as inspirational posters, to calm themselves.

So as a snooper you need to be on the lookout for discrepancies in the signals that people send to themselves and others. But also be ready to notice the absence of a discrepancy—the projected persona may match the occupant’s self-view—because this could reflect less of a struggle between inner and outer selves.