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Friday 5 December 2008

Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

Through the keyhole

William Leith reviews two new books on anthropology

What’s less straightforward is the fact that, when it comes to certain other characteristics, the bedroom snoopers come out better than the friends. When it comes to judging how conscientious somebody is, or how emotionally stable, or how open they are to new experiences, it’s better to snoop around someone’s bedroom for half an hour than to befriend them for years. A friend of mine, for instance, once told me that, during a certain period, he’d been having a nervous breakdown, but he’d decided not to tell anybody. And nobody knew. But I bet if he’d let people look around his bedroom they’d have known.

Sometimes, then, you can have a lot of information about a particular person but a poor idea of what they’re like, and sometimes a little bit is all you need. As Gladwell pointed out, it can be better to know less about somebody, because some information can be misleading. Knowing that somebody is a sportsman, for instance, might make you less able to interpret the books on their shelf. So snooping on people is difficult – but, as Gosling says, that’s why it’s so interesting: ‘Snooping is so fascinating because the relationship between clues and personality is imperfect.’

Here’s the problem. You can sometimes look at somebody’s bedroom or office and instantly get a whiff of what they’re really like, just as you can walk past somebody in the street and think: ‘that person is a criminal’ — and you might well be right. But can you know why you know? Can you understand the process scientifically? What I wanted from Gosling’s book was a series of concrete answers. The thing is that these answers don’t yet exist. This area of anthropology, as Gosling says, is still young. When we ‘form an impression’, what is actually happening is ‘a set of complex mental processes that have only recently been systematically investigated’.

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