Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You [Hardcover]

This was an interesting book, and clearly written by an author who has dedicated his life to the study of his subject. But personally I felt at the end that I hadn't learned much more than I knew at the start. There are a number of quirky and interesting observations, but to me they were the exception rather than the norm, and the remainder of the book was spent providing rather verbose examples and testimonies of the author's own research. Perhaps I was expecting too much, but with some of the praise and reviews suggesting that you would be transformed into a "super-snooper", I felt decidedly untransformed.

A lot of the actual specific findings of the research are not easy to apply to real life. For example, the author concludes in a number of places that the whole of society at large misinterprets the meaning of certain attributes, yet the proposed alternatives are often vague or overlapping. There were also several moments when the author seemed to be labouring a point unnecessarily. This may be due to the academic flavour of the book, as it is clearly placed slightly towards the serious psychology end of the scale rather than the interesting pop-psychology read end. For me, I prefer a slightly snappier pace with less academic rigour, but that is just my personal taste.

Ultimately, a significant conclusion of the book and the author is that you can't apply a one-size-fits-all approach to interpreting people's personal spaces, and context is everything. Whilst this is refreshing to hear an author admit that life is not simplistic, it does make for a rather pointless application: if everything is subjective, what can you ever hope to learn from this book?

So buy this book if you are interested in reading about the author's research into his subject. But don't expect to have any great epiphany moments or be transformed into a "super-snooper". For certain, you won't find a simple list of "what A/B/C means" inside.

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

'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.'

The book felt like it was just the author having a brief chat about his research. A sorry excuse for a book and felt more like he wrote it just to sell because there is a market but couldn't be bothered to put in the work required to write it.

Felt the book was padded with anecdotes in order to fill out the dismal little content he provided.

I hope he feels ashamed of scamming his readers.

Really disappointed and waste of money.