Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

What Does our stuff say about us? What can we find out by superficially looking at other people's environment? These are the questions that Snoop tries to answer.

People will often have two different "physical views". Some areas, such as an office cubicle are meant to be public. A bedroom, on the other hand is a private space. Sometimes people will try to portray a different image in public than in private. This can extend to the digital domain also. An email signature and facebook profile are carefully curated. However, tagged posts are not subject to so much control. Sometimes the public profile will be more aspirational. People may aspire to be neat and tidy. However, there may be evidence of an occasional clean sweep of the mess rather than actual dedicated effort to tidyness.

Psychologists have divided people up into various common profiles. Some internal traits can easily be identifiable by the physical world, while others are more difficult. Our intuition can help us in some areas, but hurt us in others. The author notes that we tend to easily retroactively understand the "correct" intuitions, but these may not be the first ones to come to mind. He found the lectures would go very differently based on the order he presented things. If he asked people to identify the person based on the environment first, people would use the "most common" criteria and then be shocked at the incorrect conclusion. However, if he first started with the "correct" identification mechanism, people would more easily put that in their frame of reference and thing that it properly related.

Music plays a key role in personal identification. The author is based in Austin, Texas where music plays perhaps a greater role in society than most other places. Could this have influenced the finding? The book was also written more than a decade ago when musical experience was different than it is today. One had to actively seek out and purchase music in advance. Now, one can instantly pick anything to stream. Does this change the identifying power of music.

One interesting finding was the power of stereotypes and the negative impact that the fear of racism has played in our public use of stereotypes. There has been a great deal of research into how stereotypes are bad and lead to improper outcomes. However, there has been very little (if any) to study how stereotypes can be good. White people, especially, are reluctant to admit that race even exists. In one study, they were given different pictures of people to distinguish. The white participants would identify by hair color, gender and any other characteristic they could before trying to use race. (Black participants were more willing to use race.) In our interactions in the world, we must use stereotypes. We cannot relearn everything. We assume that the sidewalk is rigid,even if we have never stepped on it before. Similarly with people, we can assume a great deal about them based on their stereotypes. The mannerisms, clothing and personal environment all tell us a lot about a person. This can help us to understand them better. In job searching, employers give a high weighting to a face-to-face interview. However, this can be misleading. The brief interaction may encourage us to play more to our preconceived notions. We think we are not stereotyping when we are. Instead, we should acknowledge that we are stereotyping all the time. It is normal. We can't fully know somebody. We can work on improving how we group somebody and make sure we are not relying on things that are not valuable for the given situation.