Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You - Sam Gosling

We leave behind "behavioral residue" that speaks volumes about us. This is at the heart of Gosling's "snooping": "much can be learned about people from the spaces they inhabit" (75).

Ever since a Greek physician, Claudius Galen, studied the wounds of dead gladiators and concluded that one could ascertain a persons personality type based on the physiological basis of the presence of four bodily fluids ("An excess of blood resulted in the sanguine personality, too much black bile rendered you melancholic, too much yellow bile made you choleric, and phlegmatic individuals were thought to have an excess of, well, phlegm" 35), people have been proposing personality theories. Although Galen's science has not held up, his attempt to categorize people has.

Gosling uses "the Big Five" traits - openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism - as his distinguishing categories. (For a good introduction, check out Sanjay Srivastava's brief essay at http://darkwing. uoregon.edu/~sanjay/bigfive.html or http://www.drj.virtualave.net/IPIP/ipipneo120.htm for an online test.)

Incorporating research from Dan McAdams he demonstrates how our knowledge of another person grows over time. "What is it, in concrete terms, that we know after a thousand days of knowing someone that we did not know on day one?" (57).

McAdams teaches that we progress through three distinct levels of intimacy. At the most superficial level, we use broad descriptors or traits to describe a person (she is dominant, extraverted, dramatic, moddy, intelligent, etc.) This information gives a knowledge of another in "broad brush strokes."

Going deeper, we come to know an individual's "personal concerns." What are their hopes, regrets, fears, etc.? "Personal concerns provide the contextual details that are missing from traits" (59). They include roles, goals, skills, and values. This kind of intimacy is gained by sharing details through personal interaction. Gosling relates questions from Arthur Aron's "Sharing Game" to allow individuals to grow in intimacy.

The third level is identity, which McAdams describes as "'an inner story of the self that integrates the reconstructed past, perceived present, and anticipated future to provide a life with unity, purpose, and meaning.' Thus, identity brings coherence to the different elements of our lives; it is the thread that ties the experiences of our oast, present, and future into one narrative" (66).