Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

  • Sam Gosling | Department of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin

Does what’s on your desk reveal what’s on your mind? Do those pictures on your walls tell the true tales about you? Is your favorite outfit about to give you away? For the last ten years Sam Gosling has been studying how people project (and protect) their inner selves, by what they purchase and how they arrange it around them. By exploring our private worlds (our desks, dorm rooms, bedrooms, closets and cars) he shows not only how we showcase our personalities in unexpected and unplanned ways, but also how we create personality in the first place, and communicate it to others. When it comes to the most essential components of our personalities, the things we own and the way we arrange them often says more about us than even our most intimate conversations.

Speaker Details

Sam Gosling is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas, Austin. He has spent the last decade conducting research on how personality is expressed and perceived in everyday contexts. His work has been profiled in The New York Times, Psychology Today and his work is featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Blink.

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