>> KIM RICKETTS: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. My name is Kim Ricketts, and I co-manage
along with Kirsten Wiley the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker series.
Today we welcome Sam Gosling to Microsoft Research to poke in our office drawers, study our messy desks
and examine our outfits. Well, actually not really, but that is what he does. And why? Because as an award
winning psychologist, researcher and professional voyeur, he has found that a lot of information is found in
the code behind how we organize and arrange our world. You can fake anything in some contexts: Parties,
job interviews, dates, Second Life. But the stuff you keep in your car or on your iPod, this actually can reveal
the real you.
Aside from being fascinating, there are useful applications for all of this research and I'm hoping we can get
into that a bit today with Sam as we discuss Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You.
So please join me in welcoming Sam Gosling to Microsoft Research.
(Applause.)
>> SAM GOSLING: Cool. Well, thank you so much for having me. So I understand this is a book
reading-y thing. But I'm not, I was told that reading from a nonfiction book is self-indulgent. And believe
me, I'm not beyond being self-indulgent, but today I will spare you.
Now, I'm experimenting today. Today I'm going to experiment with a Power Point. I normally just talk, but
I'm going to -- I think I can show you some spaces this way.
But I am highly ambivalent that it's the wrong, I'm highly ambivalent about Power Point.
(Chuckles.)
>> SAM GOSLING: That's the wrong place.
Because, you know, it's just going to attract your attention. So I'm going to put up a few photos just for the
hell of it, but they don't, it doesn't really mean much.
Okay. So I am going to talk really about some of the ideas behind this book, why I'm interested in it, why I'm
doing it, why you may or may not be interested in it. And then I'll maybe talk a little bit about some sort of
snooping tips and maybe, oh, if I have time I'll talk about one application of these ideas that's going on right
now.
Okay. So is there a photo? Yeah, okay. So there's a photo of, that is a photo from one of the studies we
did. One of the studies we did, we looked at people's dorm rooms. And this is a dorm room at a -- well, it's a
dorm room.
Okay. And so I'm interested in snooping. I think there are sort of two broad reasons why, two broad topics
that this book covers. The first is what the title says, snooping. That is, what can you learn about others by
snooping around their spaces? Snooping around their offices, their living spaces and so on. And what
obviously the other side of that same coin is, what might they be learning about you when they come into
your space? What impressions are they forming? Which of those impressions are correct? Which ones
tend to be incorrect? What kind of things can you pick up about people?
But the other part of the book which isn't really emphasized in the title, but I think is interesting, and that is
just really trying to think about the connections between us and the spaces we select and craft around
ourselves. What are, how is it that we relate to these spaces? And I think we, when we are creating a
space, whether it's a space in a cubicle or an office or in a home, we don't sort of think about what
psychological function is this serving? It's just something feels right. Of the 10,000 photos that you could put
up in your office, why this one? Why did you put up this photo rather than another one? Right? And you're
not thinking, oh, it's serving a certain psychological thing. You just think: That's nice.
Or why do you keep this memento, this little snow globe of Disneyland or whatever it is? Why was that
important? Why was it meaningful?
It's really just helping us to think about how we relate to the spaces around us.
And I construe spaces, when I say spaces, pretty broadly. So I'm looking at people's office spaces around
personal living spaces. There are some office spaces and living spaces.
Also looking at like cultural environments. Not really, but I look at people's Web sites. I've also recently
done quite a lot of work looking at people's FaceBook profiles and other social networking sites which I think
are very interesting new types of environments. And oral environments, too. So people's music collections.
What music people select is a way you can very, very quickly change your environment, just by changing
something on the iPod.
Okay. So let's go back. So here are some spaces from another study we did. This is a study of office
spaces. It is, can the lighting be made better? Is that as good as it gets?
Oh, look at that.
>>: Thank you.
>> SAM GOSLING: How did they know that?
(Chuckles.)
>> SAM GOSLING: It's astonishing, okay.
Okay. So here are some spaces for you to look at. I would actually, rather than you looking at these spaces,
I think it's sort of more interesting to think about your own spaces. Think about your own home spaces, your
own office spaces and when we're snooping and when you're snooping, there are sort of a number of
different ways to think about it. The obvious way is to think about, well, what is that item? What items do
you have in your space? So take something like a desk calendar, right? Maybe you have a desk calendar.
Some people have them; some people don't. So that you have a desk calendar says something.
But really, you need to go well beyond that. You need to go well beyond thinking what are the items? You
need to look at the state of those items. What condition are the items in?
It's all very well to have a desk calendar, but do you use it? Is it a used desk calendar, right? Many people,
and I'll talk about this in a little bit perhaps, is, you know, you have aspirations, right? We have aspirations.
Well, I'm going to get my life together. I'm going to get organized. I'm going to get a desk calendar and
that's going to do it, right?
(Chuckles.)
>> SAM GOSLING: But it's not, right? So you'll often see desk calendars and the first few pages have
been filled out assiduously and then, you know, it's neglected.
So really, so the state of it. You have a desk calendar, but is it used? Is it used consistently? Are they using
the proper coloring system? Are they a consistent coloring system as they go through it? What are they
doing? Are they putting big stars for birthdays? Are they putting big stars for social events and smaller
things for work events?
So you can look at the state of it.
Also, and I think this speaks to the psychological function that a lot of objects serve, what is the location or
orientation of an object? One of the things I like to look at when I go into people's office spaces, and you can
see some examples of these things here, is photos. Family photos, for example, or photos of pets or
meaning full things.
We have, and we often put them in frames in our offices.
Now, the orientation, you can have the very, very same thing, the very same photo, but its placement and
orientation, how that differs tells you about the psychological function. How do you have that photo? If you
are in your office space and you have the photo facing yourself, then it's what we would call a social snack.
Wendy Gardner has done some research on social snacks. That is with snacking, we're taking a little
emotional snack to save us through. So maybe you'd say it's a photo of you and your spouse or a photo of
your baby or something like that. And you're isolated; you're away from these loved ones or you haven't
been to a place for a long time. And you can work away and then just take a little look, oh, there's the baby,
and then get back to it.
(Chuckles.)
>> SAM GOSLING: So it's really kind of useful that way.
But you could take the very same object, right? And often you see this in people's desk and they have it
turned around. They have it facing the others, right? And so there it's not about serving this personal
emotional role. What it's doing here is it is sending a signal to others. It's saying this is who I am. Look at
me. Look, my beautiful spouse. Look at my baby. Look ...
Now, just because we are sending signals to others, I think, you know, the assumption is often that when you
send a signal to others, what it's doing is it's kind of a manipulative strategy. You're trying to get people to
see you in a certain way. Well, I think most of the time that's not true. There has been a lot of research over
the past couple of decades which says, you know, most of the time people just want to be known. They are
not trying to be seen in a polite. They want to be known. They want you to see, they want you to see them
as they see themselves. And when that's true, when that's true people are happier, healthier and more
productive.
Just because someone is trying to get you to see them a certain way, that doesn't necessarily mean they are
trying to pull the wool over your eyes. They are just trying to be known. We want to be known.
So it's really important, you know, when you're thinking about objects and go into space, it's useful to go and
look at your own objects again. And think okay, why am I doing that? What was important about that item?
How did it get there?
So those are some spaces.
Again, I'm going to show you some photos of other objects in people's living spaces from one of the studies
we did. But also I encourage you to think about your own objects, your own objects in your own places as
we do this. And I try to think of these, of the items in a space as falling into one of sort of three broad
categories. It's not a perfect system, but it's one worth thinking about it.
And the first is what I call identity claims. So identity claims are deliberate statements we make to the world.
So the photo. Here is a photo of you, of your kids sitting in a framed thing here. These are classic
examples. So things people put on their doors. This is a dorm room door, but on your office door, on the
outside of your cubicle, or in a place in a cubicle where other people can really see it, right? This is what I
call an identity claim here. "Be Your Own Goddess" or something; "Put A Brain In The White House." A
whole bunch of other stuff all over here about, which are really telling statements to others.
This is a really good example because you know who to attribute it to, right? You know who this should be.
So you might have posters of well-known icons. You can have a poster of JFK, right? You have a poster of
JFK on your wall. People come in, they know what that means. And you're projecting your values and goals
and attitudes to other people.
Those can also be, though, directed to the self. And how we would know that is how they are placed. If you
have a poster of JFK on the outside of the door, that says one thing. If you have a poster like right by your
computer monitor, again, that's helping to resonate with your sense of self and think okay, and you connect
with your values and so on.
So these are identity claims.
The next class of, the next class of objects are what I call feeling regulators. So this isn't a great example,
but I just put the photo up for the fun of it. But if you think that when we, we often when we are trying to
change how we feel, we change the environment we go to. So if you want to focus and concentrate, you go
to a library or somewhere quiet. You don't go to a nightclub. If you want to get pumped up and get really
going, you go to a nightclub or you go somewhere lively and active, not a quiet place.
So we often change our locations. But sometimes we don't need to move. We can change the location
we're in. As I mentioned before, one of the very easy ways we can do that is with music. Now, with music
we can put on some lively music. We can put on relaxing music. We can put on sad, happy music. There
are all kinds of ways we can change the environment just with music.
But we also can change the space physically. We can put up things that affect how we feel. I was recently
asked for a magazine to look at a whole bunch of photographs of people's bathrooms. There you see great
variation of how people are setting up the space in order to make them feel differently.
One of the bathrooms was set up as a kind of tranquil haven, somewhere someone could go and recharge
their batteries. Here it's sort of soft lighting. There's a whole bunch of candles which have been used, you
know, used candles around. A whole bunch of things to make your bath smell nice. Magazines near by, soft
lighting, gentle picture. So clearly, somebody goes into this space to relax and to escape from it all.
Another one of the bathrooms we looked at was very different. It was highly stimulating. It was very brightly
lit. There was a bit, a whole series of shelves right across from the shower which had an enormous
collection of plastic, different colored plastic gold fish and plastic ducks and things like that. There was a big
trophy, a big silver trophy sitting there. I don't know, I couldn't see what the trophy was, but it was about
getting this person motivated, getting this person excited, getting this person up and ready today. We often
do that.
So a lot of the things that we do here, maybe these flowers are here. You know, I don't know, I'm just saying
that because that's the photo I happen to have.
So, you know, are there in order to make us feel a certain way. So those are two broad classes, identity
claims and feeling regulators.
Another, and the third class is in some ways the most interesting. It's what I call behavioral residue. So the
residue, that is the residue, the inadvertent residue of our actions. So we do a whole bunch of stuff in our
lives. We do a whole bunch of stuff. A subset of the things we do, not all of them but a subset of the things
we do leave a trace in the environment.
So by looking at that trace, looking at the residue in the environment, you can reason back to the behavior
and then back to what, the personality that's driving that behavior. So, you know, obvious examples here,
you know, read this, reading behavior. Now, you can look at what the person does in terms of what is the
content of the books. You can look inside. Have they been really read? Have they, you know, do they have
notes inside them? Have they been organized? You know, all kinds of things you can look at.
So this is evidence of activity. Maybe, it may be evidence of constrained activity. You may be able to figure
okay, this is a course, in this case a student's room. The student took, and therefore there was interests.
You can also see other types of activities. So this was one, right? So here is, here we see the residue of not
tidying up behavior.
(Laughter.)
>> SAM GOSLING: Okay? And you see all kinds, there's all kinds of things here that you see. And so
again, this is a clear case of behavioral residue where people, where the action or inaction in this case is
left in a person's space. A good example of behavioral residue. What is interesting for this, right, this is
one of the -- this is one of the rooms in one of our studies and people often say to me: Well, surely before
you sent your team in, everybody tidied up their space. Well, this person may have tidied up.
(Chuckles.)
>> SAM GOSLING: I don't know what it looked like before, if that is the, if that's true.
Okay. So let me tell you a little bit about how we do some of these studies, just to give you an idea of where
the data are coming from, which underlie the things I'm talking about today.
So here we did a study. So we got a whole bunch of people to volunteer. And I must say when we started
doing this research I was worried that people wouldn't volunteer. I think I wouldn't, would I want a bunch of
strangers like rummaging through my stuff and looking around? I thought I wouldn't really.
But it turned out we asked people to volunteer and people, as soon as they started to think about it, they are
actually genuinely interested in what impressions people form of them. What, and I get this now all the time.
People always say come and look at my desk, tell me what it says, all those sort of things.
And people genuinely are interested. And by the end of the study we had people begging us to be in the
study, to continue the study longer so that they could have their rooms evaluated.
So what happened is, so this is one of the rooms and we would have to prepare them before. And the
preparation led to sort of a good deal of thinking about people's spaces.
So the first thing we did, of course, was cover up people's names because it was anonymous. People
participated in this study anonymously.
And then we said okay, well, what we are going to do with photographs because photographs, we know
already that people form impressions of others on the basis of what they look like. So we didn't want to keep
those photographs in there because we thought people are going to, we won't then know if people are
forming the impressions of the items in there or on the basis of what people looked like. We said okay, let's
just remove all the photos. But then no, that doesn't seem right because the photos you choose to have of
yourself, I think, say really important things about deep elements of your identity, who you are.
Which photos do you choose to display? As I said, there are many you could have had, of the many photos
you could have put up of yourselves, which ones do you have? Do you have the photo of yourself, you
know, meditating on top of a mountain in northern California somewhere? Or do you have a photo of
yourself drunkenly yelling at the camera with all of your friends during like a drunken night on the town? And
those things, right?
It can be the same person, but many people have both -- I don't know if many people have both, but which
photo you choose to display says something about the sense of self, of how you see yourself and how you
would like to project your personality to the world.
So what do we do? Well, we wanted to leave the photos in there, but without letting, without letting people
be able to see them. So we took a bunch of yellow post-its and we would put them over the photos so you
could see what was going on in the photo, but you couldn't see what the person was like. And that led to a
number of things. The first thing, of course, is that when you go into a room, it immediately indicated how
many photos they have of themselves. Some rooms or offices you go into, there's nothing, right?
Other ones you go into and the walls are plastered with yellow post-its because they just had hundreds and
hundreds of photos of themselves. You know, which is very reasonable.
But I think one of the things that it gave us, too, one of the things we found is that people are pretty good at
judging how attractive occupants are, just from going around their space. And we kind of wondered how
people were doing this. There was no direct photos of it. I think what they're doing, they're using an implicit
knowledge of mating patterns, right? We know from evolutionary psychology that people tend to mate
assortively. That is, people send to mate with people of similar attractiveness more or less. They tend to be
similar attractiveness.
I think what happened and this is one of the ways they did it. I think there were other ways, too. What they
do is they go into a space and they see a photo of Brad pit with his arm around a yellow post-it and they
would think okay, the clip, presumably the person who, you know, this Brad pit look alike is with is also
attractive like that. So I think that's one of the ways that they were figuring out.
Okay. So we prepared the rooms and then I sent in my first team of judges. So this is my first team of
judges. And they go in and they're filling out a personality ratings of what they think the person is like. Then
they leave and then I send a different team in. The different team is there, and they are cataloging all of the
things in there. So they make general judgments, like. Is it an inviting space? Is it colorful? Is it smelly? Is
it dark? Is it organized? Is it cluttered? All those sorts of things.
And then what they do is they, and then they also coded very narrow things. Are there books? How many
books? What are the books on? What are the topics of the books? Have the books been used? Is there
trash? Has the trash been emptied? Is there a clock? Is the clock fast? Is the clock slow?
They're going around and cataloging all of these things so we can see what, so we can take a look at what
the items are associated with certain judgments of people and also what the items are associated with what
the different occupants are really like.
So then they leave. But then we need top find out what the occupants are like themselves. So what do we
do there?
So we give the occupants questionnaires. They take personality tests. And we get their results back. And
so, but as you know, that may not be very good, right? Because as I'm sure you know, maybe not you but
you know other people who are deluded about themselves, right? Many of us just don't really know what
we're like and so we also get the occupants' friends to fill out surveys about the occupants, too. So we can
get both sorts of information, right?
The idea is that for some things, for some things you are a better source of information. So if I want to know,
right, it could be the case right now that half of you guys are worrying about money. Right? You could be
worrying, and half of you may not be. But I would never know it, right? Because that would not be
expressed. It's stuff that is going on inside your head.
So when you're asking people like, for things that are really internal, things that really involve your thinking,
it's best to ask the person them self, to get a self report. You can tell me, yeah, I worry about money a lot;
no, I never think about it.
But if I want to know about other things, other things that involve social interactions and especially other
things that involve sort of an evaluative element of social interaction, it's best to ask other people.
The classic example here, of course, is are you stingy, right? You don't think you're stingy, right? But all
your friends who get stuck with paying, having to pay 50 cents more because you only had the iced tea
whereas they had like an ice cream or something like that at the end of the meal, those people say you're
stingy, whereas you see it as perfectly reasonable behavior. Okay.
So what we did is, we take those two different things and we combine those. So then we could see where
we want people to -- so here are some more people and we videotape it and we had the FBI come and talk
to us. I'll talk about that in a little bit. But I mainly put us up here because it's kind of flash to have something
like the FBI associated with me. But they really aren't at all associated with us at all.
Okay. And so then here is another study we did in people's office spaces. You see people coding,
photographing, videotaping the different spaces. This is like 100 years ago with a video camera like that.
Okay. So here are some spaces. You've seen those ones before. What else was I going to show? Oh,
yes. So here is a space. People say is there behavioral residue? Yeah, here is one of the forms of, this
was just one office space. And you can see, there's a whole bunch of stuff in there. Lots of clues about what
people are like, the things they put up on their walls, the screen savers, the music they are listening to, their
reading interests. You know, other icons here and their sort of behavior, half filled glass. All kinds of things.
Some kind of medication there or something.
So there's lots of evidence of things in these spaces for all forms of these expressions, identity claims,
behavioral residue and self regulators.
Okay. So what they did was they -- oh, here is something. I like these spaces. Here are three -- one reason
I like showing these spaces is cubicle, is some cubicles which are essentially the same space, it is
essentially the same space. You can see these people have done very different things with them. And they
really sort of reflect different behaviors and project different types of personalities in terms of what's going on
in these places.
Okay. So what -- so just we used what is known as, in my field as the big 5 framework. You can see it as
the ocean model, OCEAN.
And so this is what people were trying to figure out about people. This is what we were looking at. But we
were looking at some other traits, too, which I'll tell you, other types of personality elements which I'll tell you
about in a moment.
So just to give you an idea, we're looking at openness, which I see as, I call sort of the Leonardo factor.
These are people who are intellectual. They are broad minded. They like to try new stuff. How would you
recognize these people? These people are the people that go to, you find them in the poetry section of a
book store. If they go to a restaurant, they look at the menu and they say, I've never seen that item before,
I'll have that one. Right? Whereas people low on the trait, they are much more traditional, conventional.
They say do you have spaghetti? I know I like spaghetti. I know what I know, I'll get what I know, I'll get the
spaghetti. Which again is a very reasonable thing to do, but it reflects a different outlook on the world.
Those are people high versus low.
The next, conscientiousness is a really bad label for it. I think of it as the Robocop factor. These are people
who are rule-oriented. They are not impulsive. This is really, this is what you want the people sitting in the
air traffic control tower to be really, really high on, okay? These people come to work on time. They pay
attention. They don't goof off. They are not impulsive. They pay attention to details. They are time
oriented. So really think of it as the air traffic controller factor is one way to think about it.
These people keep their pencils sharp. They have spare supplies. If you look at their offices, they, you
know, they have -- they know where the stapler is, because the stapler is right next to the sticky tape
dispenser and the sticky tape dispenser has spare rolls of sticky tape waiting to be used and they have a
place for the paper clips and the paper clips are in that place for the paper clips, and so on.
(Chuckles.)
>> SAM GOSLING: Extroversion, this is the obvious one. This is the Beverly Hills Cop factor. A lot of '80s
movies in this. So this is out going, these are the people you want at a party. Extroverts are such an
interesting group. The evidence for extroversion shows up in a lot of domains. They just like people and
they try to get people to come and speak to them. Whatever they do, wherever they are, they really liken
courage social interactions. We see evidence of this in a number of domains. In the photos that people
put up. We see it in their office spaces. Extroverts have very inviting spaces. So they are trying to lure
people into their offices, right? They have their doors open. They have like a bowl of candy on the thing.
They have a comfortable place to sit. You know, they are sort of constantly looking up as people go by.
They really want to get you in. They just like being with people.
Whereas introverts, they absolutely don't. You go in, the door is much further closed. You go in, it's kind of
an uncomfortable chair. You don't feel very welcome. Introverts just prefer not to be around people. Again,
very, all of these things -- I'm not being evaluative about any of these. It's just different ways of expressing
one's self.
The agreeableness. Actually, Mother Teresa shows, I'm told that Mother Teresa was actually very mean,
someone told me recently. So this is the Mr. Rogers factor may be a better way of thinking about it. These
are people who are just nice people, kind, sympathetic, warm versus people who are more critical, direct,
rude, you know. They don't spare your feelings.
And then the last sort, of course, is neuroticism as epitomized by Woody Allen. You know, these people are
anxious, they worry more. They are easily stressed. This is from the other end of the domain, reminds me
of the dude from the big La bow ski who is the other end of this scale, who doesn't, you know, he doesn't get
ruffled even when nihilists urinate on his carpet or whatever it is they do.
Okay. So these are the domains. So I don't know which of these do you guys think you can pick up from
somebody's, say, living space? Who thinks openness is the one most likely you would be most likely to pick
up on in living space? Few people, okay.
What about conscientiousness? Who things that is the one that would show up most clearly. Before we go
any further, who is not going to put their hand up when I ask these questions?
(Laughter.)
>> SAM GOSLING: Okay. The disagreeable people, okay. That is, okay. Eight people. Okay.
Okay, so everybody else, okay, so we have extroversion. Who thinks you can pick that up in people's space.
Okay.
Agreeableness? Two? Okay. Neuroticism? Okay. Clearly some of these people who -- oh, okay. Come
on. Get into that, you're welcome not to put your hand up if you don't want to.
So what this suggests, though, I would say probably most people thought that conscientiousness would
show up in living spaces, but what I always get is a lot of variation in the predictions people have. And
indeed, when I started doing this research, conscientiousness, that's the one I thought would show up most
clearly in people's spaces. You can imagine how people have the very organized spaces, they have spare
supplies, things are neat and tidy, the handwriting is neat and tidy, the books are alphabetized, all these
sorts of things. Indeed, that's true. Indeed, that's true.
People with those features in their physical space are indeed higher on this factor than others.
However, people who are, who have those features, who have these very organized, uncluttered, tidy places
where everything is alphabetized and organized and so on, people have those are also judged to be high on
this factor, the agreeableness factor. They are judged to be nicer. So if people go into their space, into their
space and see that they judge them to be nicer. But it turns out that's not true. It turns out they are not nicer.
It turns out that people are incorrectly using cues that are valid indicators for this dimension to judge this one
as well. Okay? And that's an important thing to know, is that people won't just judge you on this factor on
the basis of your neatness. They'll also judge this.
However, even stronger than all these, the fact that the dimension that comes most clearly through in
people's living spaces, this factor, it's the openness to experience factor. That's the one that really is most
clearly detected. People can pick this up very, very well. How do they do it? In living spaces they do it
using the, it's hard to come up with a specific reason because they, it's the biggest clue is places that are
distinctive. Things that are just unusual.
So we look -- in fact, we went past, you may or may not have seen it. So one of the rooms that was, that had
one of the occupants that was highest in openness had a bedside lamp made out of a bottle of vodka and
packets of Prozac around the side. It was full of Prozac pills on the inside, okay?
So this was a very unusual, unconventional thing. So it's very hard to come up with a specific set of items
that you will find in people's spaces. Instead, it's that it's a much broader categories. Like do they have a
bed made out of a canoe? Do they have, I don't know, do they have a stuffed piranha hanging from the
ceiling? Just things that are unusual. These people tend to be high on this openness factor.
Now, the other thing ...
Thing is you can learn, though, these are personality traits, but they are really quite a superficial way of
understanding what people are like, right? This might be good.
If you wanted to, if you wanted to decide who is going to get a certain job or be assigned to a certain job, then it
will be useful, right? If you want to say, okay, I want to know somebody who is conscientious and that's a kind of
useful thing, to say who should be in charge of the accounts or something like that. That would be useful things
to know,
But it wouldn't be useful if you wanted to know, that wouldn't be enough. You would want to know more than that
before marrying someone, right? Before marrying somebody, you want to go a bit deeper than this, right? You
want to know deeper things like what do people value. What are people's goals? What are their roles? And
ultimately you want to know how people see themselves. How do they see themselves?
And this is why I think, this is why I think places like living spaces are so important, because they contain lots of
clues to people's identity. The sorts of symbols that they relate to, the photos they put up of themselves, the art
they put on their walls, and so on.
So I think that's why, one of the reasons why looking at somebody's living spaces is really helps you get an idea
of what somebody's like.
Okay. So what I wanted to turn to now is a few just tips.
Is that a question?
>>: -- approach something, well, I mean, there are sort of three dimensions you talked about. There's how
people see themselves.
>> SAM GOSLING: Yes.
>>: How others see them and who they really are. And something you identified there is really interesting.
The conscientiousness comes across as agreeableness. But when you really have a housekeeper, you
know a Martha Stewart personality, are you focused on how people respond? In other words, even if
inaccurately?
>> SAM GOSLING: Well, I think for different things, different tasks, different levels of that are important.
So if I'm choosing somebody to be in charge of the accounts, what's really important is how they behave,
right? How they, you might say really are, right?
Now, they may not see themselves that way, right? It's quite possible that somebody -- in fact, you do see
this. Especially, especially with this trait. People, I mean, we've all had this experience, right? Where
somebody says, you know, you're going to go into somebody's house and they go don't come in, don't come
in, there's a terrible mess. My place is a terrible mess.
And it's not an act. They cannot believe, they feel it's a terrible mess. They really do. And what they mean,
or of course, by the terrible mess, is that one of the coasters on the corner of the table was out of alignment,
right? From their point of view, though, it was a terrible mess.
You know, and so for some things, when you want to know how, we want to know how they behave, how
they really are. But for other things, if you really want to know that person, even though that person thinks
they are a terrible slob, they themselves, oh, I'm a terrible slob. Look at this.
In order to get to know them, so if you wanted to know them, say, as somebody as a potential, you know,
dating partner or something like that, what would be important is to know how they see themselves. So for
different, for different tasks these different views are important.
Other things also to know is how are they viewed by their friends, right? I mean, some of our traits are
defined by how others see us, right? Like the idea that somebody is irritating or something like that, right?
That is defined by their, the effects on others.
So it depends on the task as to which one of those things we would want to look at.
Okay. So what I'm going to do is just talk about some of these sort of, some snooping tips. Just for the hell
of it.
So okay. So one of the widest mistakes, most common mistakes people make when they start snooping is
they are trying to go too far, they are trying to make assumptions on the basis of a single clue. And you just
can't do that.
Often I'll get a question where somebody says hey, I have a blue wooden chicken on top of my television.
What does that mean? Like that. And the answer is, I have no idea what it means. I have absolutely no
idea what the blue wooden chicken on top of the television means. It could be there for many different
reasons. There are a number of different reasons, not an infinite number, but there are a number of different
reasons why you might have a blue wooden chicken on top of the television. It could be because it's a gift
for somebody, it could be very important to you. Perhaps it really reminds you of an important moment.
Perhaps you are a chicken aficionado. There are a number of different reasons. One of the biggest things
that we do is to not interpret clues in isolation. When you are looking at a, when you are going through and
looking for broad themes. We are looking for themes and I have Sherlock Holmes there, but really, the figure
I use in my book is Hercule Poirot saying really, you're building up a case. Because each piece of evidence
that we know about from snooping research, any one piece of evidence is not conclusive evidence. It is just
shows that tends, people who do this tend to be this way. You're building it up.
You meet somebody and they give you a firm hand shake and you say okay, well, I know from the hand
shake research, that means they tend to be higher on extra version, tend to be lower on neuroticism and if
they are female, they tend to be higher on openness. You say I know that. But it's not a conclusive case.
That will direct me.
Now, let's look at the music. Is that consistent with the music? I'm interested in extroversion levels so I
know that music is a good place to look for that. It can direct you to these different tasks. You're building up
a case.
And this, this relates to the second tip for snooping. That is to be very, very wary of distinctive information.
Distinctive information, the very thing that makes it distinctive is the thing that means you should be very
wary about interpreting.
Let me give you an example from our research. In one of our studies, we went into a bedroom of a female in
her 20s. And everything in the room said she was a socially responsible wholesome person, okay? It was
neat and tidy. There was evidence of doing good activities. There was a calendars, the calendars were
nicely filled out. There was sort of evidence of attending all kinds of wholesome, wholesome groups and
doing things like that.
The music was sort of very gentle, a lot of nationally merchant in there, all those sorts of things going on.
And so, except over in the corner of the room there was a plastic crate and in that plastic crate was a whole
set of drugs paraphernalia, including a bong for marijuana and all kinds of stuff in there, okay? Okay of
course, this stuck out. Our judges come into the room and they look around, boring, boring -- oh, look at the
crate. They go over to the crate and spend hours pouring over the crate and ignoring everything else.
Now, that crate stuck out in a way that it wouldn't stick out in somebody who is less wholesome and more of
a rebel, more counter culture, where they had, you know, more of a sort of reckless person's space. It
wouldn't stick out so much there, but it stuck out in this space. And it stuck out because it was inconsistent.
But because it was inconsistent, that's why they should have ignored it because it was, it suggested this is
not part of this person's overall pattern. And indeed, when I asked the occupant later on, I said what was
that plastic crate doing there? She said oh, well, my roommate was going to go traveling around the world
for a year and she asked me to look after her drugs paraphernalia, so I put it all in a crate and put it over in
the corner of the room.
So it did in fact reflect her wholesome friendly kind behavior of looking after her friend's drug stuff.
(Chuckles.)
>> SAM GOSLING: But it didn't reflect her drug taking behavior, but it's very easy to miss interpret that
thing.
So be very, very careful about interpreting the stuff that's very distinctive.
I've already talked a little bit about location. So here is some cases, this is one I went around for a television
studio's offices and here, different sets of photos. This is what I was talking about earlier about the location.
You see the photos on the right. Now, those, I'll show you the broader picture of the office in a moment.
These are the baby pictures which are all down there. You'll see that just off the side of the monitors, these
are the social snacks. Whereas here, these ones are on the window ledge behind where the person sits,
right? So you come into the office and you see him framed by all the, you know, his beautiful, you know,
progeny.
So there you see, so this is where the photo, where the social snacks were on the computer screens right
here, where he can look up, whereas these were behind, framing the guy. Again, location is very important.
Particularly one of my colleagues is an example of the location. One of my colleagues, he has somebody
who is a mentor of his, an academic mentor. And he was particularly fond and add admired this person, but
he took the social snack. You could tell it was a social snack by how he organized it. But it was too much for
him to have it -- excuse me.
It was too much for him to have it framed in front of him. That would have been overwhelming to have this.
So what he did, he took this picture of Ned. It was a famous psychologist, but who he felt very fond of.
He took this picture of Ned and put it on the inside of one of his cupboards in the office and it was the inside
door. And I only know because I saw him doing this one day. He was working and just before we went out,
he opened the cupboard and took a little look. It was like a little, just like a little dose of Ned and then closed
it and could leave like that.
So you could tell that was the function it was serving by its location and how it was used.
What else was I going to -- oh, yes. The other thing I was going to talk about, it's all very well to say when
you're snooping around that, you know, isn't it fun? What can you learn about somebody whose space
you've never been in, you know. That's kind of a fun thing to do.
But it's not very realistic, right? It's not actually very realistic. You're in someone's space whom you've never
even seen or never even met. What's far more realistic is someone you kin of know, you're just getting to
know. And they invite you back to their office; they invite you back to their living space. And you see, oh,
what more can I learn about them? That's what is much more realistic.
That's where sort of understanding these ideas of snooping, looking at location, state, so on, can really guide
your search for information. Sometimes it's quite a basic search, is asking someone but knowing what
questions to ask.
My friend Lisa who when I first met her, I didn't know her very well, okay. When I first met her, she invited
me back to her house for a cup of tea. We have a cup of tea and I excuse myself and go to the bathroom.
But on the way to the bathroom I go through the bedroom and when I'm in the bedroom, I noticed this
bookshelf, this bookcase. And on the top of the bookcase there is an ordinary bookcase, but on the top
there's a little raised area and Hemingway's movable feast is sitting there and it's facing out and it's clearly
been placed very carefully. It's a little sort of a Hemingway shrine.
Now, I didn't know what the Hemingway novel meant, but I could tell from its placement that it was important.
It was really central to Lisa's identity. That led me to ask questions, led me to ask Lisa about that. She then
told me about this theme, but how it was important to her because of the period it was written about, when
helping way wasn't famous and so on. Then that began to gel with other things I knew about her. For
example, the quote she had at the bottom of her e-mails. You know, the signature files where you have
quotes. It was consistent with that.
So it led me to ask questions and about things that I never would have guessed otherwise.
So anyway, so that's another thing, snooping. The other thing I just wanted to warn you, if you start
snooping around people's places and you go up to them and say okay, this is what I think about you. Am I
right? They'll often say no, wrong. And that happened to me. And the point is that people don't have very
good insight. I hinted at this point earlier. So my friend Lois, I went around her office. She was in a different
Department at the university. I went around her office and was just in the classic air traffic controller's office.
I came out and said well, I think based on this what I think is, I think you plan and you think ahead. You have
spare supplies. You know, you are very punctual person. You show up on time for classes.
She goes aha, no, you got that wrong, didn't you? She said recently, I've actually been showing up really
late for my classes. I thought that's a bit odd. Okay. So what do you mean?
She goes actually, for the past few weeks I've only been, I have been showing up for my classes only 15
minutes before they start. Now, for her this was the end. Chaos was about to be unleashed in the streets
because she was only showing up 15 minutes before her classes started. Whereas I, I have never shown up
15 minutes before my class. First of all, it seems like a waste of time. And even if I wanted to, I just couldn't,
I don't have it in me to get my act together to do that. I just couldn't do that.
So it shows you that you have to be very, very careful when, because part of having a certain personality,
which affects your space also affects how you see the world. We all know people, somebody who is very,
very anxious. They just perceive a world full of threats. The world is just a threatening place. So if you're
with somebody anxious, and then like a door slams down the -- what was that?
Whereas if somebody who is laid back, they don't even notice it at the time. You just see a different world
and that can affect how you respond to these sorts of things.
Okay. Now, I don't know what to talk about. So should I stop and take questions? Or should I talk about
some architecture stuff? I can go either way. Who is in charge here?
>>: You.
>> SAM GOSLING: Really?
>>: Or maybe you guys. What do you think?
>>: Architecture.
>> SAM GOSLING: I'm going to talk very briefly about this stuff that, some work that has been done
applying this stuff.
So if you think, what I have been talking about is, I have been talking about the spaces that you and I, we all
have these spaces and we take a sort of standard space and we try to mold it, right? We try to select motifs
and colors we like and we try to take a standard space and fit ourselves into it.
A work by Chris Travis who runs this architecture firm -- there is Chris sitting -- I don't know if that's really
what he looks like. Oh, no, it looks fine here. It looks very narrow on my screen.
There he is. Chris Travis. So he runs this architecture firm where he really incorporates psychology from the
very, very beginning. Before he's even begun with the plans he goes into this very, very deep psychological
interviews, these extensive psychological interviews which ask you about your relationships. They ask you
about your childhood, very extensive section for that. On special objects and so on.
Then he used this understanding of the sort of the psychological, what space means to you, what objects
mean to you. And sometimes there, in many cases they can be very frightening things for people. One of
his clients, you know, was abused as a child, you know, in a dark space. So he couldn't have any dark
spaces in that space. Although she wasn't consciously aware that that early experience was affecting her
preference for certain architectural styles.
And so his house is very -- it's not, one thing that is interesting, this is one of the houses he developed. It
looks like an ordinary house, but this really picks up -- I'm not going into detail on this one. I'll go into it on
another one.
People who really enjoyed wandering the narrow streets of Italy. That sort of happy memories. So he's built
kind of like, it's like a street. He has sort of, like a street goes all the way of here, but the bedrooms open on
to it as though you're on a narrow street on one of these Tuesday can towns and there's all kinds of things
going on in this space and it just looks like a very, very nice house.
All the houses are different. It's not like he's hit on the one thing that works. They are all very, very different.
So I just wanted to talk briefly about this next one. So this is by a guy who, and Travis says this is quite
important, especially in guys who say I'm a view guy. I like views, okay.
And that's how it's experienced. It's the experience of I like views.
But what Travis has learned through doing this, and so he has. You see, he's built a three-story light house,
kind of on top of this house with views all the way around. But what people really mean, Travis has learned,
when they say they are a view guy, what they mean is they want to survey their dominion. They want to say
look what I have accomplished and acquired, right?
It's really showing off. It's showing off to their friends: Look at all I have. Look at what I have done. And you
know, which is a very reasonable thing to do to others which often in the case of these men shows some
kind of proxy for some sort of father figure. Look, I've succeeded, I've done all right.
So this is this one guy. But of course, you ask them, the people don't experience it that way. They
experience, the psychological experience is: I like views.
Now, one of the interesting things is he designs these houses for people and with only one exception. On
the first design after these long interviews, the interviews take a long time. He designs these houses for
people, with one exception. He shows them designs and they say that's it. And they go with the first design.
Which I don't know how many of you have been through architectural processes, that's very rare. Most of
the time in architecture it's taken up with redesigns. The architect who is taught they're an artist, right? Don't
tell me what to do. I'm the artist. Here is my piece. Do you like it? You don't like it. Well, all right. Then
they go and redesign it and try to do some more, right?
But they are not integrating these sort of psychological meanings at the very early stage.
But one of the very interesting things is although nearly, almost without exception, having gone through this
process, people arrive at a space they adore. Everyone I spoke to said we love this place. Even so, then I
say okay, well, tell me, I was interested. Tell me how the interview and the psychological analysis played
into the design of your place. And they go oh, that didn't have anything to do with it. It played no role at all.
It's amazing, Travis told me that people had no, would not recognize that it had anything to do with it. But
they, but I didn't believe it until I saw it. Here was a case where he takes important objects. So this was a
widow whose husband was a doctor and he used to use this old a gurney, an old gurney which he used to
keep his old paints on and they converted it to a chopping board in the middle of the kitchen. And we were
looking around the kitchen here an Travis said oh, yes, of course, it was really important for us to have this
gurney because it was a connection to both her, you know, her former spouse and his profession and the
fact that he used it all the time. So we used, you know, we put this in the center of the kitchen. She said
what? Oh, that thing, that had nothing to do with it. And I saw her, her face. And she nearly burst into are
tiers and then just pushed it away and carried on. She was unwilling to acknowledge the role that it played.
Although it clearly contributed to how she felt about it.
Now, when I was driving home, I must say that one of the things that Travis has learned is that when we
create spaces as adults, when we have the financial and social ability to create a space we want, he said it's
amazing how often that what we're doing is we are retrying to recreate a grandparent's home. The feeling
we had as a child running around, going to grandparents' home because so often these spaces or places we
go, the parents take you to these places and you can be safe and fun and grandparents can spoil you. And
it's just sort of a wonderfully relaxed place. He said it's amazing how often there's some kind of echo of a
grandparent's place feeling in this space he designs.
I remember driving home from looking at all these homes in my sort of very superior way thinking oh, isn't it
sweet how all those people are affected by their grandparents' homes. Oh, you know, how weak-minded
they are and so on. Then I get home to my own house and I open my refrigerator and I had this flash of
realizing, I've done this myself. Oh, my God, I've done this myself.
My refrigerator is kind of unusual. Oh, God, I was going to show you that. There is my refrigerator. And that
really is it, that's what my refrigerator looks like every day. So it's not, this is not set up for the photo just
before coming over, and you can see it's kind of like an OCD refrigerator.
You may have guessed I'm not generally OCD. And it stays this way. If someone says oh, yeah, have a
Tab. Fine, here you go. And they turn their back and have a look and I quickly replace it and put another
one there.
And this is not my normal thing. And I've often wondered, why is my refrigerator like this? I'm not like this in
are my other domains. What's going on?
After talking to Travis. I'll show you, look, see, there's my desk on a really good day. That's about as good
as it ever gets. And there is my refrigerator. Okay.
So I wondered. Then I had these flashbacks to playing with my brother at my grandparents' house. When
we were a kid, we would go to my grandparents house and there would be the living room and it opened up
on to the garden. We could go play, go play in the garden and go have fun. And if you ever get thirsty just
come inside and go to the drinks cabinet and help yourself to tonic water.
How many can we have? As many as you like. As many as we like? like it was unlimited tonic water. It just
seemed like amazing to have this sort of amazing idea of abundance, you know. For us, there could be
nothing more than as many tonic water bottles as we like.
And so to me, it really represented this feeling of plenty and happy and, you know, the world would never
end and all would be wonderful.
Then I suddenly realized that what I have done here is I have recreated my grandmother's drinks cabinet
essentially with this idea that it will never end and the world is good and happiness.
Yeah, we are running out of time. I'm going to stop there. If we have time for questions, I'll take a couple of
questions.
>>: We do. We have half an hour.
>> SAM GOSLING: Don't you guys have to rush off somewhere? You don't? You don't have work to be
doing? Okay.
(Chuckles.)
>> SAM GOSLING: Well, then, I'll just show you these plans because these are interesting.
So I was talking about Travis being a slightly different type of, slightly different type of architect, right? So
where most architects will draw a plan and what they will have is they will have in their plan, it says
something like master bedroom. Hallway, something like that. What he does is he, his plans are marked
with the psychological, the psychological environment they are trying to create. So it says what he is trying
to create. And he also uses these. So here are a couple of, for example, now I'll show you a couple of his
plans.
Here you see, this is one, this is one master sleeping area and it says tranquility heaven, is what this says,
okay?
Of a rejuvenation of spirit. Things like that. Master bath, private and personal. But here, so here's one
thing. But they are not, but not everybody, not everyone's association with their master bedroom is
tranquility heaven. This is another one of his designs. And here the master bedroom says privacy, passion,
reflection. Okay?
So through this process he starts off with the psychological feeling he is trying to create and then builds a
place for that.
How does he do it? He does all kind of things. It's really interesting. Talking to him about how he works with
couples. He says so often many of the issues in a relationship either the things that are going wrong in a
relationship or the things that are failing to kind of be nurtured have architectural solution. Here is a whole
exercise called remodeling your mate. It's much easier to change your house than it is to change your mate,
or to change your mate's behavior even.
And so he has a whole section both on how you can avoid the things that go wrong in a relationship. Many
of the things, the sort of annoyances that go wrong. You know, why is he always in my kitchen under my
feet? They are just silly little things like that. But also in terms of nurturing relationships. For example, one
of the couples he talked about, they said well, he said what are the rituals you perform? What are the sort of
daily rituals you perform to help? They say well, we go into the kitchen to have a coffee together, but it's kind
of crazy by then. We're so busy with kids around.
So what he did for their design is he created a house which, where he knew this was an important ritual for
them which had a little coffee bar inside, a little coffee bar inside the bedroom. There's a coffee bar inside
the bedroom. So before they have gone out, they get up in the morning, this couple who are incredibly busy.
Before they have gone out of the bedroom and facing kids and life and all those sorts of things, they can
have a little coffee together. They make a coffee. And there's a little porch. And the little porch, so they can
go out there and just sort of look out into their yard. And that decision has huge design implications because
where you want the porch facing affects the whole way you orient the whole house, the whole orientation of
the house is affected by that.
So he is able to use the architecture to sort of like build in these psychological principles of what we are
trying to do with our space.
Okay. Now I'm going to stop and I'll take some questions. Sorry about that.
(Applause.)
>> SAM GOSLING: Oh, stop.
Yes?
>>: Going back to the FaceBook pages and assumptions about the correlation between the way they fit
themselves ...
>> SAM GOSLING: The question was, have we looked at FaceBook pages? Actually we've done a -sorry?
>>: Or MySpace.
>> SAM GOSLING: Yes, we've done quite a lot of work with FaceBook. I didn't talk about it today, but we
have done quite a lot of work with people's FaceBook pages.
And the question we had is, what are people doing with their FaceBook pages? I think there are a number of
different answers to it, at least our research suggests there is. The first question is, they are doing a lot of
different things. Some people are using it to project themselves. Some people are using it as a means of
social interaction, so on. What we really thought was going on was we wondered whether, are people just
trying to create an ideal self? Are they trying to promote themselves as an ideal self? Is it sort of like an
area to advertise themselves? Or is it more like just a mode of interaction like the telephone?
And at least in the samples we were using who were nearly all students, it's really just, our analysis suggests
it's just another means of interacting. And how we found that is we asked these people, we got how do you
really see yourself? And we actually got a whole bunch of information from others about how they are seen.
And how would you like to be? And then we got people, other people say to just look at their FaceBook
profiles and judge them on the basis of their FaceBook profiles. And the judgments corresponded far more
strongly with how they really saw themselves than how they would like to be.
What was another really interesting finding from this research, though, was that people have no idea how
they are viewed. We said how do you think you're viewed on the basis of your FaceBook profile? And with
the exception of their extroversion, they were pretty clueless about how people were viewing them. But
again, there's lots of things that are going on there, right? It's an opportunity to project yourself but also to
interact. And I think FaceBook and MySpace and all that stuff is so rich, because there's so much going on.
It looks trivial, right? If you look at people's wall posts, when they are having these conversations on the
walls? And then you think, you just need to look at those, right, to realize that people aren't trying to create a
good impression. Hey, how are you doing? Fine, how are you doing? Good, not much. How are you
doing? All right.
So these are not the interactions you would post on your wall if you wanted to create a good impression,
right? It's just frivolous at best.
Yes, person in red.
>>: When you look at the -- odd things in someone's space, do you look at whether or not that object
would be a naturally occurring item in that space? And determine whether or not it's, you know, when you
look at that openness factor.
So if I have a stapler in my office, it makes sense. If I have a stapler.
>> SAM GOSLING: In the bathroom.
>>: Right, in my bathroom.
>> SAM GOSLING: Yeah.
(Chuckles.)
>> SAM GOSLING: Absolutely. And sometimes you need to look at the local environments. Recently is
was asked to go around the news week offices. I went around a bunch of news week offices and they
wanted me to actually just compare two of them. They said okay, take a look at these offices. And this is
something I recommend you do before you go through and do any snooping, is you have to assess the
local conditions. And go and see what are the norms?
So I went to -- so I go and see what's normal because if you go and see okay, it's a completely empty wall,
you don't know. Has that person failed to decorate it or is it company policy not to do it? You have to assess
the local condition.
That's exactly what I mean, the question of not interpreting isolated cues. A stapler in a bathroom has a
completely different meaning to a stapler sitting on a desktop.
You know, we saw -- yesterday, you have some local TV show, something afternoon?
>>: First afternoon?
>> SAM GOSLING: First afternoon, yeah. I was going through their offices and I go through the first office
and somebody has a little red plastic ducky sitting there. I thought oh, that's interesting.
Now I go to the next office and they have the same ducky. It's obviously some freebie that they've all gotten
and I learn okay, it doesn't mean so much as it might otherwise mean if this person had brought it in, you
know.
Any other questions? Yes, person in green.
>>: I want to make sure that the observer knows about the, his other her own background. Like, for
example, when people was raised like with supply of beverages or say tons of pictures on the walls and
there is a bedrooms with tons of pictures, it's quite normal. But it might not be the case if you come from a
different culture, what you have in your home or from different countries.
>> SAM GOSLING: Yeah, I think you touch on a number of important points there. The first is, how would
these things be played out, they may be played out very differently in different cultures or from different
backgrounds.
And I think that's true. I think first of all, many of these processes, especially the identity claims, will show up
more in cultures where it's important to express one's self. And in some places that's less important. But I
think these specific items may change across culture to culture or things like that. But I think the general
processes remain the same in terms of letting others -- so you might apply that to a local context.
But it's also important to have an expert in the domain you're in. So I don't -- I mean, I don't have, I don't
have a television. So I don't know anything really about what goes on on TV. And so if I need to go to, you
know, teenagers' rooms, I need to go with an expert who can tell me the significance of these different
things. If I go to a female's room, I go in, right, a female goes in and she says oh, look at that; it's mack
makeup, not cover girl, how significant. Whereas I go and I see make up. This makeup. So within that
frame it's very important. Yes?
>>: Have you performed any of these studies in cultures that are either less western influenced or not
western at all?
>> SAM GOSLING: No, I haven't. All of my research has been done in this country, you know. So that
certainly is a limitation of that, but in terms of the ways I think is some of the processes may be played out
less strongly, but I think some of them are played out but just using a different, a different currency, you
know.
Yes, person over there with the yellow thing around your hand.
>>: Hear a little bit more about snooping in like music collections. What do you find and how do you do
that?
>> SAM GOSLING: Yeah, I think music collections, we have done quite a lot of research about looking at
people's music collections. And it makes a good deal of sense. I mean, when we started doing the
research, we played a, we had the subjects playing getting to know you questions, but getting to know you
exercise where over six weeks their job was to get to know each other well. And, but they weren't ever
allowed to meet. They just sort of typed to each other, chatted to each other. An we found that music was
the most common, more common than any other single topic that people used. People have an intuitive
sense that music is important, and we have found that it is. It is indeed important and it's important in a
number of different ways. First of all in terms of the specific genres people listen to. That's really crucial.
So we know the different personalities tend to prefer different genres. Of course, these are generalizations.
But there is other things you can learn, too, about them. You can learn, you can learn about the
organization of the music collection. You can go and look at somebody's CD collection or something like
that, how organized is it? Mine -- I'm not going to talk about mine. There's, you can see how organized it
is. But you can look at the general themes, too. Is it uplifting music? Is there vocal music? Just general
themes across that, too, are also diagnostic of personality traits.
And another thing worth saying here is that here is the case where one might use stereotypes. You might
use stereotypes to make inferences about like the typical, the typical country music lover. The typical classic
music lover, and so on. So we have done quite a lot of work looking at the extent to which these stereotypes
are valid.
And we found that some stereotypes are valid. So, for example, generally the stereotypes about country
music listeners and classical music listeners, those sort of things, the rock music listeners, those are
generally valid.
Other genres, like dance music, like hip hop and so on, those, the stereotypes about those listeners are less
valid.
Again, you need to know when, stereotypes are often useful, but often they will be misleading, too.
Yes?
>>: Do you have any thoughts about people who project a dislike for music all together? That's my first
question. And the other one is have you made any observations about the contrasting sizes of residential
homes in this area as far as like there's lots of people with really big homes and then there are lots that
are --
>> SAM GOSLING: Yeah.
>>: Any thoughts about people's preference for sizes of space and what that says about them?
>> SAM GOSLING: Well, I think it does, but again it's the case where you need to look at the local
environment. So having a small house in the middle of Manhattan means something very different from
having a small place in the middle of west Texas because, you know, where you may have the same
choice and like that. Again, you need to look at the thing.
But yeah, I think it certainly does. People, it reflects, as in many of these things, so even the size of house,
right, is a potential reflection of many different things. It could just be the upbringing, right? So you would
need to do snooping to see if it was that. It could be, hey, look, I want to show all I have accomplished.
Look how, you know, marvelous I am.
So for any clue it's impossible to say what it reflects, right? But what you need to do is you need to look for
the consistencies in patterns across other domains. But that would be one possibility.
>>: -- music and ->> SAM GOSLING: One more question after this. The music question?
>>: Yeah. If somebody just didn't seem, people who don't seem to like music at all.
>> SAM GOSLING: Yeah.
>>: Is there any aspect of that?
>> SAM GOSLING: Well, I mean, we know people who like a lot of different types of music tend to be
much higher on the openness dimension and a lot of people use music in order to regulate their emotions.
So it might be people who have less need or less inclination to try to regulate emotions. I don't know, do
you have a thought about that?
>>: I was just wondering.
>> SAM GOSLING: Well, one more question. Yes?
>>: Have you looked into closets, closed spaces, places that hold stuff that is ...
>> SAM GOSLING: Yes, we have, we have looked at them a little bit. I think it is very important to look in
these places. That tells you a little bit about how deep the orderliness and organization runs. So, for
example, there's a big difference, right, between -- and Eric Abramson has talked about this, different
varieties of mess, different varieties of neatness, right? You could have neatness because you just don't
do anything. Or you could have neatness because you do a lot, but then you tidy it away. Then the sale
things with mess, with looking inside closets. We would look for a discrepancy here. What is really
interesting are people who want neatness because they just want to have, they want to have order in their
life, but they don't really have the deep structural traits in order to -- I mean, the traits in order to bring about
a deep structural tidiness. What I would be interested in is do they have neatness outside of the closets
but Kay owes inside? It's like I just have to get clutter away. They take the clutter and stuff it in the cub by.
We often find this as hey, this is a really neat desk. Then you look in the drawer and what they have done is
they've opened the drawer and gone ... just scraped everything into it. That's a very different brand of
neatness to somebody who has everything lined up within that drawer.
>>: Thank you very much.
>> SAM GOSLING: Thanks for having me.
(Applause.)