Your Personality In A Poster – Or A Purse?

Gah, spent all day doing qual in a school, about an hour’s drive from the city. So, the second half of my review on ‘The One’ will have to go up tomorrow. But I did find something today that relates to a comment I’ve had on my mind for a while – from The New Scientist:

Sam Gosling [homepage!], psychologist and author of Snoop: What your stuff says about you (Basic Books, 2008), analysed photos from a handful of New Scientist readers to see what he could deduce about their personalities.

Gosling has spent a lot of time snooping while researching the psychology of stuff, and he’s learned how a person’s personal belongings reveal quite a bit about how they score on the “big five” personality traits: extroversion, emotional stability, openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness. To learn more, see Richard Wiseman’s review of Snoop.

Yes, Richard ‘Quirkology‘ Wiseman did a review of the book! And although I’m rather skeptical about the validity of personality types, it’s got some interesting claims about the … uh, claims our belongings make about us. I consider ‘personality’ to be a label that we infer from behaviour, rather than ‘personality’ being a causal entity. Wiseman writes:

You might think that highly creative types (creativity is often seen as an important facet of “openness”) would have books and magazines covering every inch of floor space, and that friendly people would decorate their rooms in warm colours. You would be wrong on both counts. In fact, according to the analyses, it is the variety, not quantity, of reading material that is the real giveaway of a budding Leonardo, while colourful walls are not indicative of friendliness. Inspirational posters, by the way, are signs of emotional instability.

So much for every psychology, counseling office and workplace on the planet… Perhaps exchange them all for products from www.despair.com?

Considering my last plant (parsley) died from my plucking it to death in order to make Eggs Benedict every Saturday morning, I’m wondering just how fair that is.

At any rate, after a challenge from a friend as to just how many pens and pencils I carry around with me (I got the nickname ‘Girl Friday’ after producing whiteboard markers for hapless presenters when attending their lectures) – I’m trying to figure out what my everyday bag says about me:

It’s actually a ‘pouch’, a rather nice backpack made a few years back by Country Road that can either be worn on one shoulder or both. And it holds all this and more, quite comfortably. In case you can’t see some of the details, there are two books (one is “Ex Libris” by Anne Fadiman; the other “The Occult Tradition” by David S Katz – one for enjoyment, one to keep me studying when stuck on a train!).

There’s a diary – the Granta “The Books They Tried To Ban” 2008 edition, with a lot of papers in it, like my schedule for the next two months. There’s a black iRiver mp3 recorder for qualitative research; an IKEA pencil for note-taking, about four pens and an Estee Lauder lip-pen. The bottle is a mixture of two scents from a DIY perfume store. The ‘Hair Play’ is a foil packet of creme left over from my last travels; sunblock is in the white tube. Purple post-its for page bookmarking and a handful of bandaids. And Podblack business cards ahoy!

I’d say that anal retentive workaholic (spot the Verbatim USB stick?) with an addiction to peppermint TicTacs and a nasty tendency to buy products by 3M Office Supplies… what do you consider best reflects your personality? Or is this just telling you some things about my everyday behaviour – but still more needs to be shown about just how I interact with them?

By the way – since Wiseman is known for his magic as well as his psychology, you might like to check out this article. It seems some others are starting to catch up on the links between magic and cognition – finally! From Live Science, an article on ‘Magicians Know More Than Scientists’…

“Although a few attempts have been made in the past to draw links between magic and human cognition, the knowledge obtained by magicians has been largely ignored by modern psychology,” said researcher Ronald Rensink, who specializes in vision and cognition at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Rensink, UBC colleague Alym Amlani and Gustav Kuhn of Durham University in England recently lifted the lid on some key techniques in the classic magician’s toolbox.

One of their revealing experiments highlighted the disconnect between what participants saw with their eyes and what they were focused on with their minds.

The researchers showed 46 participants a video clip of a magical performance while measuring each subject’s eye movements. In the performance, a cigarette and lighter once in the magician’s hands disappear (he drops each into his lap). About 50 percent of the participants claimed to see the objects being dropped while the others didn’t.

…The researchers say magician’s techniques could be used by cognitive scientists to test various theories.

“Magicians have been using these psychological principles to manipulate our perception [for centuries],” Kuhn said. “Cognitive science, particularly looking at attention and the interaction between attention and awareness, is a fairly new discipline, whereas magicians have been doing this for centuries.”

Tagged as: book, deception, handbag, Magic, magicians, New Scientist, personality, personality types, podblack, Psychology, research, Richard Wiseman, Sam Gosling, Science, Snoop