![]() ![]() The trick to decoding a person's space is knowing what to look for. Others, like the songs you download or the coffee cup you throw away, are what psychologists call "seepage," messages that leak out beneath your notice. Some clues come from explicit, deliberate identity claims, like the Malcolm X poster on your wall or the crucifix over your bed. Gosling's conclusions are supported by rigorous academic research, but his engaging book is aimed at a popular audience he presents it as a field guide to the "special brand of voyeurism" he calls "snoopology." Few readers may actually rummage through their neighbors' garbage in search of what Gosling dryly calls "behavioral residue," but Snoop's conceit makes for an entertaining tour of how people project their inner selves outward into the world. His premise is that our personalities seep out in everything we do and that expert snoopers can draw remarkably accurate pictures of us by examining the traces we leave behind. ![]() ![]() Sam Gosling, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, has made a career of studying how such clues illuminate personality. One of the aptitude exams it developed was the Belongings Test, in which candidates had to draw conclusions about a man based purely on items in his bedroom: clothes, a timetable, a ticket receipt. ![]() In 1942, as the United States was entering World War II, the Office of Strategic Services - the precursor to today's CIA - was scrambling to find promising spies to go behind enemy lines. ![]()
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