What your stuff says about you

Zan Boag: Your book Snoop looks at how we form impressions of others based on their stuff. In your research, you literally looked through people’s stuff. You picked under beds, peered in closets, rifled through music collections. How did you go about your research and how did you get people to agree to let you do this?

Sam Gosling: It was a weird thing, actually, that I found when talking about going through people’s stuff. We really wanted to look at real people’s stuff, not some contrived recreation of it, to see how people do leave their stuff. People have this intuition that you can learn a lot about people from their living spaces but until we studied it, we really had no idea if that was true and if it was true then for which types of traits. Looking back on it, you say but I really had no idea how much you’d be able to learn about people from looking around at their stuff. As you can imagine, it was quite a big study to undertake: moving a team of judges around eighty-plus bedrooms, without having any direct contact between the judges and the owners of the spaces. In terms of getting people to agree, it was this weird reaction that I got where I’d say, “Hey, can we come