Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

Barz—he’s a snacker. But he doesn’t hunger for food. He hungers for connection with his family. The photos are social snacks that tides him over until he can reconnect with his loved ones in person. Wendi Gardner, a professor at Northwestern University, has studied social snacking and has provided compelling evidence to suggest that these psycholog

One of Borkenau’s most surprising findings is that soft facial lineaments (that is, the contours of the face) are a key to spotting agreeableness; consistent with this result and with some earlier research from the 1980s, he found that a “baby face” look (a round face, large eyes, small nose, high forehead, and small chin) is associated with agreea

So as a snooper you need to be on the lookout for discrepancies in the signals that people send to themselves and others. But also be ready to notice the absence of a discrepancy—the projected persona may match the occupant’s self-view—because this could reflect less of a struggle between inner and outer selves.

living spaces are great for learning about openness, conscientiousness, and, sometimes, neuroticism; but if it’s people’s extraversion or agreeableness you’re after, a peek at the “most played” list on their iPods is more telling

from McAdams’s perspective, when we’re talking about identity, whether our beliefs about ourselves are true or not is pretty much irrelevant. This is why McAdams brilliantly invokes the concept of a myth when talking about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves—like ancient myths, they’re coherent narratives that may or may not be true. So h

Self-Verification Theory—suggests that such a desire is not always true. It suggests that we would prefer to be seen as we see ourselves, regardless of whether those self-views are positive or negative.

In his classic book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman suggests that in our daily lives we are like characters in a play: We take on roles and present a front. Accordingly, what we say and do during a social interaction is like a script. Goffman says that it is easier to stay in character than to react authentically. When we act an

a principle called anchoring, meaning that the first information we encounter has an unduly large influence on what follows.

Dan McAdams. He’s a brilliant and exceptionally creative professor at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy and the author of the influential book The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self.