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Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You (Hardcover)

by Samuel Gosling (Author)
3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Profile Books (28 Jun 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1846680182
  • ISBN-13: 978-1846680182
  • Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 14 x 2.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 126,102 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review

"Sam Gosling is an engaging writer, a brilliant psychologist, and a charming individual, and he must never, ever be allowed inside my office!" - Mary Roach, author of Stiff and Bonk


Mary Roach, author of Stiff and Bonk

"Sam Gosling is an engaging writer, a brilliant psychologist, and a charming individual, and he must never, ever be allowed inside my office!"
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Inside This Book (Learn More)
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Difficult First Album, 20 Aug 2008
By O. Buxton "Olly Buxton" (Highgate, UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
I suppose you can't blame Sam Gosling for trying to catch a wave, even if it took him a while to catch it: his variety of psychology - drawing deep psychological conclusions from superficial evidence in the shape of personal detritus in bedrooms and offices and the outward shape of public internet spaces like facebook pages, blogs, websites and the like - was given prominent billing in pop-psych guru Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink as an example of "thin slicing" we do everyday to get by in the world. Gladwell's made a mint; Gosling must have thought he might be able to too.

But just as Gladwell's book - a difficult second album after The Tipping Point - was itself superficial and largely directionless set of anecdotes, Gosling's first effort while promising much, delivers little more than a cursory trot through the "big five" personality traits (which won't be news if you've read Blink), an overarching framework of how these might be signified by "behavioural residue" (being evidence of how you behave left behind when you've stopped behaving and left the room) , "feeling regulators" (photos of your kids, the current Arsenal striker, symbols of your chosen deity and so on positioned around your space to cheer you up) and "identity claimers" (the selfsame items to the extent they are presented to make a statement about you to the rest of the world).

And that's about it. The remainder consists, yet again, of loosely organised anecdotage to bind the one to the other, occasionally leavened with unimpressive statsitics gleaned from half-hearted experiments that Gosling and his underlings have performed. Some of the underwhelming observations you won't find on the dust jacket, then:

* there is very little in an office or bedroom environment which would tell you anything about a person's extraversion, agreeableness or neuroticism (being three of the "big five" traits). The two which you can deduce conclusions are conscientiousness (how tidy you are) and openness (how many African Masks on your walls or albums of World Music in your CD rack). Golly.
* Music tastes are basically useless for gauging personalities for most forms of popular music.
* If you find evidence which appears to contradict your theory about the subject's personality, it is best to ignore it and only look at the evidence which does fit your theory.

Indeed, that's pretty much the problem: Gosling's method purports to be scientific, in the sense of reliably telling you something about a room's inhabitant, but is so liberally sprayed with caveats (those dirty socks might belong to someone else!) as to be little more than an appeal to the sort of intuitions one doesn't need a psychology professor to tell one how to exercise. They're --- well, intuitive.

Indeed, that was Malcolm Gladwell's point: we make these sort of snap judgments automatically and subconsciously, which makes the young Professor Gosling's field guide all the more dispensable.

Olly Buxton
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing, 30 Jul 2008
By ds (Whitby, UK) - See all my reviews
  
What trails of ourselves do we leave in our everyday lives? What do our living spaces, our email sigs, web pages, social networking profiles and even our iPods say about us? This is the principal question that this book asks.

It's an odd book this, but all the more interesting for it. Reading much of it I was thinking that we were mostly in the domain of common sense though, as Gosling himself says, this may be in part due to the action of hindsight. Having said that, there are some interesting examples of counter-intuitive phenomena and misinterpreted cues that do act against this.

The basic thrust of the book relies on a system of personality analysis commonly known as Big Five and so the early chapters lay the foundations for this by laying out a quick summary. After that, Gosling gets into specific contexts for, and examples of, his observations (I hesitate to use the word hypothesis here, probably because this is not really a formal academic text)

Gosling himself writes with great perspicuity and not a little wit, rather ironically giving us some possible pointers to his own character in the process. It's one of the reasons I wanted to (and indeed do) like this book

I'm not sure whether the principal question is ever really fully answered in a concrete enough way for some readers but it certainly provokes a lot of thought and should certainly make you as the reader wonder about the particular trails you leave in the course of your own life.

Certainly recommended.
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4.0 out of 5 stars Stuff to think about, 4 Sep 2009
By S.M. Gidley (Sidmouth, Devon, UK) - See all my reviews
This book doesn't entirely do what it says on the tin; if you're expecting an in-depth analysis of what a shag pile rug says about the owner or what you can read into a menagerie of fluffy gonks on your colleague's desk you're going to be disappointed.

However, that's not to say that this isn't a very interesting book. Some other reviewers have pointed out that Gosling seems to be stating the obvious but that isn't really very fair. As an academic, he has explained psychological concepts very well and in a logical manner that would succeed in engaging most people in what can be a complicated area (personality testing and profiling). He also has an excellent prose style and supplements his citations of academic research with personal anecdote as well as explanations of his own academic work.

What I found most interesting about Gosling's argument was not so much the significance of what we own and what we chose do with it but more the fact that no matter what we try and do our true selves will always come out.

This is an interesting book that is appropriate to read in an age where rampant acquisition seems to be the name of the game.
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