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Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

Through the keyhole

Sam Goslingby
Profile, 260pp, £15,

William Leith

Wednesday, 16th July 2008

William Leith reviews two new books on anthropology

Here are two books by anthropologists — Sam Gosling, from the University of Texas, and Daniel Miller, from the University of London. Both are British. Both set out to explore one of anthropology’s central questions: what is the relationship between people and their possessions? At the start of his book, Gosling says, more or less, that if you look at people’s stuff in the right way, you can find out what makes them tick. Miller, on the other hand, is more tentative. He doesn’t want to generalise. But then, the people he studies seem much weirder than the people Gosling studies. Or maybe Miller is weirder than Gosling. As with all anthropological matters, it’s hard to know for sure.

Both Gosling and Miller know that the relationship between people and their stuff is a complex one. You can’t walk into somebody’s house and see a tennis racquet and know for sure that the person in question plays tennis. They might just want to give the impression they play tennis, in an effort to fool people. Or someone might have left a tennis racquet at their house. As Gosling points out, if you jump to conclusions, you might easily jump to the wrong ones. A bible in somebody’s office might be a sign of a religious person. On the other hand, some companies give a bible to every employee.

So jumping to conclusions is wrong, right? Not necessarily. Gosling once devised an experiment about jumping to conclusions. Malcolm Gladwell described it in his book Blink, which is the best book ever written on jumping to conclusions. In the experiment, Gosling asked people to answer certain questions about their friends. Then he asked some strangers to snoop around the bedrooms of the same people. The results were fascinating. If you’re somebody’s friend, you will have a pretty accurate idea of how extrovert they are, and also how agreeable they are. That sounds fairly straightforward, doesn’t it?

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James Manners

July 18th, 2008 2:51am

The reference to brake cables is daft. Cars have used hydraulic brakes for over 50 years. Even looking at the state of the brake linings is no indication as they should only be changed when worn down to their safe limit. However, you could check on the car service record to see how often its brake linings have been changed and compare it to the average for the same model.

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