Snoop (What Your Stuff Says About You)

The beauty of Snoop is the enormous amount of research covered and insights one can gain in such an easy to read book. Unlike many psychology related books, Snoop is applicable and action oriented. Not only do you gain theoretical perspective the reader is also in essence, being "trained" to take note of his or her personal surroundings and of those around them and to make sense of the story these artifacts have written on the wall. This body of knowledge has a multitude of applications. Whether you are interested in what your rebellious son's messy room, yet meticulous music collection has to say about him or as a manager, what your employees office space reveals about them, you can gain that knowledge by reading Snoop. Most of us strive to gain a better understanding of who we are and of those we call family and friends, Snoop is here to help.

This is a fun, quick-to-read, interesting book full of curious tidbits of information. It's not presented in a scientific manner or bolstered with statistics, but it will help you in your efforts to size folks up before you get to know them. It's fun. Gosling basically shows us that we can infer quite a bit about a person by looking at his or her possessions. There's absolutely nothing new about that premise -- we jump to conclusions about others based on their dress, their car (or truck or motorcycle or biccyle or bus pass), their office decor -- long before we know the person inside. When we look at a car -- the make, model, condition, contents, cleanliness, decor -- we infer something about the driver's age, gender, even ethnicity. When we see a full shopping cart at the grocery store, we do the same. Is the person buying this stuff young, old, Korean, Latino, Polish, conservative, traditional, liberal, male, female? You could probably come up with some ideas pretty quickly. Going into an unoccupied bedroom and trying to determine whether the inhabitant is male or female, young old -- um,not exactly rocket science. Gosling takes it a step further -- he tells us what to look for and what it means and what it doesn't mean. Gosling discusses a variety of external-facing identify claims, quotes and taglines people put at the end of their e-mails, how photographs and other memorabilia are displayed, what's on the iPod playlist. Gosling notes that political conservatives are more likely than others to have sports related decor. Who knew? People often assume that a variety of art & books are indicia of liberalism, but that assumption is incorrect . . . Gosling shows how stuff can be used to mislead -- someone can trick others into thinking they're something other than what they really are --Does the tidy desk belongs to a normally tidy, organized person or if it was tidied up just for the occasion? Is the job interviewer is as he presents himself? How can you tell if the person really has read every Dostoevsky novel and the complete works of Shakespeare or if he is just trying to fool us into thinking that he has. Interestingly, the book's subtitle is "What your stuff says about you." The text itself goes much deeper than just looking at stuff -- it looks at the stuff, how it is organized, how it is stored or displayed, whether it is consistent with or out of place in its environment. Gosling shows how to look behind the scenes to find out if the stuff that's visible & clearly on display tells the same story as the stuff that is not-so-visible -- what's hidden in the drawers, behind the desk, the receipts in the trash can. Apparently, trash is particularly revealing, as most folks don't make a conscious effort to control what they discard. Discarded receipts, programs, papers, food containers can provide a wealth of information for the trained snooper. People often have books on display because in an effort to p

Few writers can entertain and inform at the same time. Even fewer can back up the informational component with their own empirical research. Sam Gosling is one of those few. Sam snoops. In your office, your room, or your trash, Gosling digs up diagnostic information about your personality. Not (purely) out of prurience, but out of scientific doggedness, he systematically assembles a personality profile that can be used to predict future behavior. Unabashedly, Gosling discloses a full range of snooping strategies. And goes on to link them to popular notions of how we make decisions about people. One comes away feeling both guilty and comforted by the fact that we are cluttering up the world with evidence of our passage.

I run an architecture firm and know of Sam Gosling's work. My wife posted above immediately after she finished reading Snoop, and reviewed this book without disclosing that a process we use with our clients called the Truehome Workshop is discussed in the last chapter of this book. She was not attempting to be deceptive. She simply did not believe her tenuous connection impacted the relevance of her review. In any case, we apologize for any misunderstanding. Because I do know this man's research, I am here to tell you that in real world situations, understanding both how your personality and values impact your decisions about your home - and separating "trash from treasures" - make a big difference when it comes time to making decisions about changing your living space. I mean a big difference in time, money and how you feel about your new living space when you have completed your project. People tend to think of such issues as "fluffy" but in truth they are central to creating a home that fits. After all "home" is really an emotional experience. You "feel" at home. A house is made of bricks and sticks, tile selections and floor coverings, but not a home. The difference between a house and a home is created by how much your living space fits your lifestyle, tastes, values, budget, emotional needs and personality. So we are talking about emotional assessments cued by features of your home environment like comfort, self-expression, a feeling of safety, privacy, control, lower stress levels and the like. Real world experiences! Almost all of those "feeling of home" are a result of your automatic emotional response to features of your living space that are unconscious, often from childhood, and most of us are not aware of how much they influence important financial and aesthetic decisions. Our clients almost always lack an understanding of the impact of these deep emotional and psychological influences on their decisions. That is why we spend a lot of time learning about them - and helping them become aware of them - BEFORE we begin a design. The more you know about who you are relative to your living space, the better job you can do of making choices that will have lasting value. That is the deeper level of what this book has to offer while it trains you to be a "Snoopologist."

I loved this book. It is sharp, easy to read, clever and real science. The author has a dry sense of wit that had me laughing more than once. Snoop goes way beyond the typical "personality" tome. It is a tour of the latest science in behavioral psychology as it relates to personality. The unique thing about Gosling's research is that he shows how who we are shows up in the environments where we live and work. Architects and Interior designers are going to love this one as much as psychologists and social scientists. It opens up a whole new way to gossip about people, so no doubt it will be a best seller! Sam Gosling has a gift for making serious research about behavior and environment relevant to the average reader, and in fact wildly interesting. And he does it without selling out the science. I suspect this book will end up with a huge audience. Really Great! A must read.