“Snoop – What Your Stuff Says About You”
Dr. Sam Gosling
ISBN:978-1-84668-018-2
Cost £9 (half price!) from Amazon.co.uk
Difficulty
Requires study. If you're a cold reader with half a brain, you'll be fine.
Review
For someone like me - a self-confessed information junkie with a passion for statistics and psychology - this is an essential book. For a mentalist or reader looking for a new edge, it’s also essential. Gosling is
associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. His area of research for the last decade has been how we project our inner selves onto our everyday lives – how we dress, our stuff, how we use language, etc. He’s the world’s leading authority on using this “behavioural residue” to enter your mind to find the real you.
But while this book is accessible, it’s certainly no easy pop psychology read. You have not “seen it all before” either, believe me. This is a serious, original work. The acknowledgements run to 3.5 pages, the references to 17. This is cutting-edge psychology applied to predicting your character, your attitudes, your actions, your future – even the way you vote. Derren Brown has nothing on this guy. Gosling shows how to uncover various layers of personality to get to the “inner story” of a person. If you’re familiar with things like OCEAN or Goffman’s “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”, you’ll be up and running in no time. If you’re not, it’s okay: everything’s explained for you.
Did you know, for instance, that personality traits cluster together? Do you know what motivates narcissists, or that in Spring 2001 (way before 9/11) David Winter of the University of Michigan wrote a paper accurately predicting what George W. Bush would do during his presidency and how he’d run it? Do you know how? Gosling does, and he spills the beans.
Overall
My copy of this book already has plenty of pages turned down, pencil marks and notes in the margins, and there’ll be plenty more before I’m finished. If you do readings, get this book. Read it. Learn from it. Use it. It puts what would normally be several hundred very learned academic papers into an easily digestible and above all accessible form you can use. I also urge you to visit Gosling's homepage at the University of Texas and read about his research.