Personal Possessions Can Be an Object Lesson
On top of my computer sits a desiccated piranha displaying a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth. Why is that fish there? To remind me of that wonderful trip to Venezuela? To signal I’m not to be messed with? Maybe it’s there because I’m a creative, unconventional individual who refuses to be fettered by the stifling dictates of corporate office culture. Or maybe I want people to think I’m a creative, unconventional individual who refuses to be fettered by the stifling dictates of corporate office culture.
If one little dried-out fish can potentially carry that much information, just think how much could be gleaned from a roomful of possessions. And we are constantly trying to glean. Which of us, visiting a home, hasn’t nosed furtively through a CD collection or bookshelf to try and get some measure of our host’s personality--and balked, perhaps, at that Barry Manilow boxed set or the big stack of “Passion for Knives” magazines?
“It’s a basic human need to want to know what people are like, for all kinds of reasons: Can we trust them? Are they a potential mate?” says Samuel Gosling, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas in Austin. “So, when we’re in places where information is rich, we make use of it.”
Not everything we deduce will be accurate, of course. People may display misleading messages. Someone who’s ruthlessly ambitious might adorn his or her office with cloying inspirational posters applauding teamwork. A conservative college kid may flaunt CDs of hip, nihilistic rock stars to appear cool.
Observers, what’s more, may extrapolate erroneously from what they see. The fact that I have a teetering, 2-foot-high in-tray doesn’t necessarily mean I’m scatterbrained and undependable. And only the shadow knows what my co-worker with the welcoming basket of candy and smiley-face pencil is really thinking.
To find out how much people deduce from someone’s “social environment”--and whether those deductions are accurate--Gosling and his colleagues enrolled 83 current and former students and 94 office workers in a study. All agreed to have either their bedrooms (in the students’ case) or offices assessed by 7 or 8 observers.
Participants were told not to alter anything. And even if they did rush around picking up sweaty socks, “there’s a big difference between a tidied room and one that’s deeply tidy,” Gosling says. “There’s only so much you can do in a short time to alphabetize the books and CDs, color-code the stationery, sharpen all your pencils and line them up--things that deeply tidy people do.”
Each assessor then scored the occupant on a scale of 1-7 for five broad personality traits (known, by psychologists, as the “Big Five”):
* openness to new experiences;
* agreeableness;
* extroversion;
* emotional stability, a measure of how calm, relaxed and self-assured someone is;
* conscientiousness, an indication not of morality but dependability (whether people are apt to show up for meetings and pay their parking tickets on time).
To test the assessments’ accuracy, Gosling and colleagues compared raters’ assessments to ones done by occupants and friends.
Raters gleaned a lot in just a few minutes, Gosling says. (The study, “A Room With a Cue,” is published in the latest issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.) They weren’t great at accurately assessing agreeableness and extroversion, but they were surprisingly adept at scoring someone’s dependability and openness to new experiences.
Now Gosling and colleagues plan to analyze the phenomenon in more detail. They have huge inventories of room contents--all those pebbles from beaches, unwashed coffee mugs, postcards declaring “you don’t have to be crazy to work here but it helps,” and more. They want to dissect more precisely what these things say about someone.
They also want to learn which conclusions we make about people are accurate, and which not, so that people can better and more fairly assess potential mates, workmates or employees. Gosling notes that some employers prohibit the personalization of office spaces. Might this damage morale? “The fact that wherever I go I see these expressions of individuality leaking out makes me think it probably isn’t a good thing to do,” he says. He plans to explore this further with pairs of students, one of whom will get to decorate the living quarters of the other. Effects on their psyches will be measured.
“What, for instance, would happen if I made you trade your piranha for an angel?” he says. “You’d probably find it very distressing.” As, very likely, would anyone who befriended me based on that angel.
*
If you have an idea for a Booster Shots topic, write or e-mail Rosie Mestel at the Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st. St., Los Angeles, CA 90012, rosie.mestel@latimes.com.