UNIT 6: LISTENING 2 What Your Stuff Says About You

Neal Conan, Host: This is Talk of the Nation. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. The framed items on the

wall of my office include my FCC third-class radio telephone operator's (1) license from

1973 and the New York Times crossword puzzle from the day my name was used as a clue. There's a
baseball on my desk, not signed or anything, just a baseball. Some toys sit on top of the speaker: a beach

chair with a life (2) preserver, a double - decker London bus, and a (3)

corkboard has family pictures, John F. Kennedy behind the wheel of a PT-109, and a
postcard of (4) Giants Stadium in New Jersey. Sam Gosling, are those few things enough to
tell you anything about what kind of person I am?
Sam Gosling: Yeah, they certainly could tell us a lot. There's a lot of information, a lot of it not so

(5) obvious , but there's a lot of information in places like people's personal spaces, their

offices or their living spaces.

Conan: And not just what they are, but the way they're arranged. For example, if the family pictures look

out to the guest in the office or, urn, or (6) inward to, uh, to the person who

occupies it.

Gosling: Yeah. It's really (7) crucial to combine not only what they are, but how they've

been placed. Because how they've been placed gives us good information on the (8)

psychological function that they serve. So if we have photos of, say, our family and our

beautiful (9) spouse facing us, that shows us, it's for our own benefit. Um, it's what you

might call a social (10) snack, s omething we can snack on to make ourselves feel better

over the day. If it's turned the other way, then it's more for the benefit of others, which doesn't mean it's
(11) disingenuous. It may not be trying to pull the wool over people's eyes,

but it, uh, informs the function that the photo serves.
Conan: Sam Gosling studies personality by looking at stuff. Stuff in offices, bedrooms, cars, and

bathrooms. What's there and how it's (12) arranged can provide clues about who

we are and what's important to us. So we want you to call or email us and describe the room or the car

you're in right now. What's on the wall or the desk, the videos and the CDs, the (13)

bumper stickers, your radio presets. Our phone number is (14) 800-989-
8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our blog at (15)

npr.org/blogofthenation. Later on in the show, the romance and

monotony involved in real (16) archeology. But first, Sam Gosling. He's an

associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas in Austin. His new book is called Snoop:

What Your Stuff Says About You, and he joins us today from the (17) studios of

member station KUT in Austin. Thanks very much for coming in.
Gosling: Pleasure.

Conan: And your book is called Snoop, because that's what you (18)

propose to teach us what to do.

Gosling: Yeah. Snooping around people's, uh, places, and I should say that I (19)

construe , uh, "places" very broadly. Not only our, our physical environments
but our oral environments, too, such as our music collections, our (20) virtual
environments like our, our personal home pages or our Facebook profile. So if people, if people who
want to call in want to talk more broadly about spaces, that would be fun, too.
Conan: And of course, to figure out what personality type-what stuff tells you about you, you have to

know what personality types are to begin with. (21) Introvert, extrovert, are two

that I guess everybody knows about.

Gosling: That's right. And there are a number of ways of thinking about personality. And, uh, you can

think about personality traits, which is what most research has done on it, and within that (22)

domain there's, uh, the, uh, system known as the "Big Five;' or the "five-factor

framework;' which talks about these different traits. As you say, introversion, (23)

extroversion i s the main one, but there are other important ones,

too.
Conan: And how did you get interested in this? Are you a natural-born snoop?
Gosling: Well, I think we're all natural-born snoops. And, I mean, some of us are more curious than

others. Some of us will open the medicine (24) cabinet

we go to a party, and some of us won't. But I think we all do because it's crucial. If you think, who, who
when

are the people who are-what is the element of the environment that's most important to us in terms of, of
how well we get on in terms of professional lives and personal lives ? It's other people. So I think we're
naturally attuned to picking up on whatever information is out there, and there is a lot of information out
there in people's spaces. So I think we all do it.
Conan: And so we size people up as soon as we see them, as soon as we shake their hand, for example.
Gosling: Yeah, as soon as we shake their hand. And there's a you know, the handshaking has been a part
of (25) etiquette books for years and years and years, but it was only

recently that it was really subjected to a really (26) rigorous study. And

there was a study done by Bill Chaplin in 2000 which looked at exactly that. It looked at what can you
learn about someone from a handshake.
Conan: And sometimes, it's, it's interesting, uh, you can learn something about it but you can also come
to a conclusion that's, easily wrong.

Gosling: Right. That's the point, yes. For example, taking the example of (27)

handshaking , if somebody, uh, grips your hand firmly and looks you in the

eye, uh, and smiles as they're doing it, then we form an overall positive impression of them. We, we form
all kinds of positive things. Yet it turns out that the handshaking, uh, firmness is only a clue to some
traits. So we are going beyond the evidence. And so, it's really important to know which are valid clues

and which ones are (28) misleading.

Conan: And in the clip of tape that we heard at the beginning of the program and, uh, throughout your

book, you use the example of Agatha Christie's great (29) detective ,

Hercule Poirot.
Gosling: That's right, because it's really important-you know, if I had one wish, one wish in the world, it
would be that one clue told you something about a person. If you had a stuffed teddy on your bed, it

meant something, you know. But the world is more (30)

complicated than that. So unfortunately, it doesn't work like that

because there are many reasons why we might have, say, a stuffed animal on our bed or something like
that. And so really, you can't use a ( 31) codebook approach where x

means y. What you have to do is you have to build up a picture piece by piece, and sometimes you only

have a very little piece and you have to hold your view very (32)

tentatively . But that will, that will guide your search for more

information.
Conan: So that postcard of Giants Stadium, well, it could tell you that I'm a Giants fan, which is true, but
it could also tell you I grew up in New Jersey.

Gosling: It could, or it could tell you-it might have (33)

sentimental meaning. Who is it from? Is it from somebody

important? And so in 'order to resolve that, what we would do is we would look for other clues. So the

baseball there would begin to help us (34) resolve the meaning of

the, of the, um, uh, the postcard itself. We might also see, well, these other items, the crossword puzzle,
these other things which, which might modify the meaning that, which helps us resolve OK, so maybe

(35) recognition is important. We learn that you're somewhat

sentimental. And that helps us clarify the meaning of each clue.