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rsadelleI said I was going to let this project go for now, but I did promptly check out nonfiction from the library. This book is from a hundreds category I've already read in this year, so it gets classified as a bonus book.
This week I read Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You by Sam Gosling. The premise of the book is that you can tell a lot about a person by their space. He specifically looks at what are known as "the Big Five:" "the most extensively examined - and firmly established - system for grouping personality traits." The five are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, which he says you can remember by the acronym OCEAN. He has a very short version of a test to measure it in the book, and he refers to an online version you can take. (I did both versions. I'm high on conscientiousness, average on agreeableness, and low on neuroticism, openness, and extraversion.)
As usual, what I didn't like about the book was that it wasn't what I expected. I expected it to be a more concrete field guide to examining other people's spaces. At the end of the book, he does specifically tell us what he learned about two people's offices. But most of the book is focused more on personality research. You can tell he's an academic writer; while there are bits that are more casual and entertaining, there's a lot of "so and so at X university did research and found out this thing."
I did start thinking about what my spaces say about me. Take my desk at work, for example. I have three decorative personal items (I also have two things of lotion, but let's focus on the more interesting things): a small picture frame with my happiness commandments is right up against one of my monitors, my Serenity promo postcard is to the right of them a bit, and my Princess Protection Program calendar is on the wall to the right of that. One of the things he talks about in the book is looking to see how personal people's decorations are to see how much separation they have between their work selves and their home selves. If you didn't know about fandom, you'd think the promo card and the calendar are very impersonal, but if you do know, then you realize they're actually signs of integrating my selves into my spaces.
He does touch on the ways your expertise can affect your interpretation: "When I look through a woman's apartment and see a tube of lipstick, I see a tube of lipstick. Many women looking at the same evidence would see a tube of MAC lipstick, or Covergirl lipstick, or . . . well, as a reflection of my low level of cosmetic expertise, I have already run dry on lipstick brands."
It was an interesting book, and I'm definitely going to start paying more attention to people's spaces - although it seems like being able to carry the book around as a reference (there are a lot of charts and tables and such) would make snooping easier.
This week I read Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You by Sam Gosling. The premise of the book is that you can tell a lot about a person by their space. He specifically looks at what are known as "the Big Five:" "the most extensively examined - and firmly established - system for grouping personality traits." The five are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, which he says you can remember by the acronym OCEAN. He has a very short version of a test to measure it in the book, and he refers to an online version you can take. (I did both versions. I'm high on conscientiousness, average on agreeableness, and low on neuroticism, openness, and extraversion.)
As usual, what I didn't like about the book was that it wasn't what I expected. I expected it to be a more concrete field guide to examining other people's spaces. At the end of the book, he does specifically tell us what he learned about two people's offices. But most of the book is focused more on personality research. You can tell he's an academic writer; while there are bits that are more casual and entertaining, there's a lot of "so and so at X university did research and found out this thing."
I did start thinking about what my spaces say about me. Take my desk at work, for example. I have three decorative personal items (I also have two things of lotion, but let's focus on the more interesting things): a small picture frame with my happiness commandments is right up against one of my monitors, my Serenity promo postcard is to the right of them a bit, and my Princess Protection Program calendar is on the wall to the right of that. One of the things he talks about in the book is looking to see how personal people's decorations are to see how much separation they have between their work selves and their home selves. If you didn't know about fandom, you'd think the promo card and the calendar are very impersonal, but if you do know, then you realize they're actually signs of integrating my selves into my spaces.
He does touch on the ways your expertise can affect your interpretation: "When I look through a woman's apartment and see a tube of lipstick, I see a tube of lipstick. Many women looking at the same evidence would see a tube of MAC lipstick, or Covergirl lipstick, or . . . well, as a reflection of my low level of cosmetic expertise, I have already run dry on lipstick brands."
It was an interesting book, and I'm definitely going to start paying more attention to people's spaces - although it seems like being able to carry the book around as a reference (there are a lot of charts and tables and such) would make snooping easier.