Sublime

Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida).

Our studies have shown that novice snoopers usually think that invitingness betrays high agreeableness, high conscientiousness, low neuroticism, high openness, and high extraversion. As a super snooper, you know that it signals extraversion only.

But McAdams’s contribution goes far beyond clever portraiture. The crucial lesson from his work is that getting to know someone is not just a matter of knowing more about the person; that “more” must be a different kind of information. You have to go beyond traits, such as how kind the person is or how talkative; you have to begin understanding the

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

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

Expertise plays a crucial role in a judge’s ability to figure out what someone is like. When I look through a woman’s apartment and find a tube of lipstick, I see a tube of lipstick. Many women looking at the same evidence would see a tube of MAC lipstick, or Cover-girl lipstick, or . . .

Most of us don’t have access to McAdams’s formal method of eliciting information about identity. But, happily, snooping is a good shortcut to this key component of personality because much of our everyday stuff holds clues to identity. As I noted in chapter 1, a good place to find these clues is in the photos of themselves that people choose to dis

Like extraverts, people high on neuroticism have decorated offices, but, as we saw, the content of the decoration is slightly different. Whereas extraverts keep pictures of people around them, those high on neuroticism use decoration, such as inspirational posters, to calm themselves.

openness can be judged accurately in many domains;