So I thought, let’s go and see if people who score high on the scale have tidier rooms than people who score low. “The students had created a scale to measure how orderly and organised a person was, and we wanted to test whether the scale worked. “He’d always emphasised that anything a person does potentially provides information about what that person is like,” he said. His fascination with snooping started when he was a teaching assistant in his professor Kenneth Craik’s class on personality assessment while studying at Berkeley. So a snooper would learn to discount the clues that lead others astray.” For example, our research shows that people use clues like how tidy and organised a space is to form impressions of how nice a person is, even though these attributes are in fact completely unrelated to niceness. “Who would make a good employee, who would be a good friend or date? This means getting a good read on others-snooping can help us in that task because it teaches us which cues to trust and which ones to ignore. “Every day we are faced with the tasks of negotiating our social worlds,” he explained to Texas Monthly in an interview.
There are practical advantages to learning how to snoop – or, in less startling terms, to being aware of how to read spaces. But it’s the books in the bedroom, or bathroom, that give a clue to the real reading habits of the owner, and the possible desire to appear learned over the desire to actually be so. Their location: in the living or public spaces, is another clue to their psychological role. Going into a home and finding rack after rack of volumes might beg the simple assumption the home-owner is a serious reader but the state of the books – pristine, unread, no notes or annotations, impeccable binding – reveals their function. Of course what you own is important, but a host of factors – their condition or location, for instance, may reveal more clues than your ownership of it. The answers, it turns out, are surprising – and not as simplistic as we’d imagine. It’s no surprise that our spaces give clues to our personality, but Gosling – who is Professor of Psychology at the University of Austin, Texas – says we didn’t really know what you can learn from people’s spaces till they started this research. Gosling – author of Snoop: What Your Spaces Say About You – is a social psychologist whose area of research is a voyeur’s dream come true: he explores what our most intimate spaces and possessions reveal about us. That’s because many who hear of his work for the first time have an ‘isn’t that obvious?’ reaction. Sam Gosling didn’t write the book ‘Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer’, but he probably agrees wholeheartedly with the sentiment.
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