Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You: Amazon.co.uk: Samuel Gosling: Books

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"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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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Difficult First Album, 20 Aug 2008

By	Mr. 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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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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3.0 out of 5 stars The Consulting Detective's Guide to the Bleeding Obvious, 3 Mar 2009

By	Diacha (London) - See all my reviews

Sam Gosling is an English-born professor of psychology at the University of Texas. He has been recruited to appear on television to deduce a subject's personality from photos of his or her bedroom effects. Sherlock Holmes meets Big Brother. Now he has written the Guide on how to do it.

My own inner detective was hoping that reading this book would enable me to gain the advantage in business negotiations by glancing at my counterpart's office or score points at dinner parties by scanning my host's den. It didn't happen, but that really doesn't matter.

It didn't happen partly because Gosling belongs to the Ronnie Corbett school of story telling - the punch line is oft deferred through a series of diversions and anecdotes - perhaps , living in Austin, he has succumbed to the Texan art of the philibuster - and partly because the conclusions from snooping are so obvious. Indeed, psychologists' ability to deduce the obvious from quasi scientific experiments and then endow it with quasi scientific labels (self -verification, the aspired self etc) verges on self parody.

It doesn't matter for three reasons. First, the digressions are generally quite interesting in themselves. We learn about the Big Five personality descriptors, about the concentration of personality traits in different regions of the USA and that the thieves who stole Mr Rogers' car returned it out of respect for his public persona and so on. Second, the bleeding obvious isn't as obvious as we think. True, when the clues suggest that someone is "open" or "extravert' or even "conscientious, " chances are that they are. However, clues that suggest "agreeableness" or "neuroticism" are often misleading. Gosling provides several useful tables which compare what observers routinely deduce with what is actually the case and it seems that our vaunted" blink" ability to make snap judgements is often simply wrong. Finally, Gosling is a witty and interesting writer who maintains interest throughout.

Net, net this is not quite a weighty, Holmesian monograph, but it is a moderately entertaining read.

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	64% buy the item featured on this page: Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You 3.0 out of 5 stars (3) �11.49
	12% buy Quirkology: The Curious Science of Everyday Lives 4.4 out of 5 stars (28) �4.79
	10% buy Personality: What makes you the way you are 4.9 out of 5 stars (7) �5.99
	9% buy Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You �5.39


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Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You (Hardcover)

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