In this episode, we meet Dr. Sam Gosling, author of “Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You” who shares his scientific insights into how personality and character can determine how we express ourselves in our intimate spaces.
Sam Gosling is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas, Austin. His research focuses on the psychology of physical space, how personality is expressed in everyday contexts, and on new methods for collecting data in the behavioral sciences. His approach is ecological, emphasizing the importance of studying individuals in their natural habitats. His current work aims to use psychology to inform architectural practice. His book “Snoop: What your stuff says about you” is based on the idea that we deliberately and inadvertently express our personalities in the environments in which we live and work. Clarivate have identified him as one of the most highly cited scientists in the world.
https://www.podbean.com/ep/pb-2enat-1756c40
Rachel Melvald: Welcome to The Psychitect Is In. It is my extreme honor and pleasure today to introduce our guest, Sam Gosling, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.
Sam is the author of the book Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, which explores the idea that we both deliberately and inadvertently express our personalities through the environments in which we live and work. Sam, do I call you Dr. Gosling or Sam? What are you more comfortable with?
Sam Gosling: Sam works for me.
Rachel Melvald: Sam works for you?
Sam Gosling: Whatever you’re more comfortable with—I don’t mind.
Rachel Melvald: Oh, thank you. I’m just finishing my doctorate at Tulane, and it’s all about how you address your professors, right?
Sam Gosling: Oh, well, I don’t know. It was very different for me when I moved from the UK to California. It was much more casual in California than in the UK.
Rachel Melvald: In the UK, did they have to address you by Dr. Gosling?
Sam Gosling: No, I was a student at the time, so it was a matter of calling someone by their official title and waiting to be invited to use the less formal mode of address. But I was pretty startled when, on my first day of graduate school, I saw all the other graduate students casually referring to faculty by their first names without hesitation. That was a bit of a shock to me.
Rachel Melvald: So, not formal, right?
Sam Gosling: Yeah.
Rachel Melvald: Are you British? I don’t think I realized you’re from the UK.
Sam Gosling: Yeah, I’m from the UK.
Rachel Melvald: Oh, okay. Well, there we go.
To further introduce Sam—now that I have permission to call him Sam—I met him at the Intentional Spaces Summit in D.C. this past year, hosted by Johns Hopkins.
Sam Gosling: Yeah.
Rachel Melvald: I’d say it was a pretty groundbreaking, premier summit. Was it hosted by NeuroBlueprints? Am I getting that right?
Sam Gosling: I can’t quite remember who hosted it. It was some very capable people doing a great job.
Rachel Melvald: They were doing a great job. It brought together a huge think tank of researchers, academics, neuroscientists, architects, artists, psychotherapists like myself, and other professionals.
There was this magic in how we all came together with the shared goal of living in spaces intentionally, in ways backed by science, to promote healthier living. I’d say that was the intention.
By sheer luck, I got into conversation with Sam. I had bought his book, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, years ago. It was one of the first books I read when I realized I wanted to combine working with couples, design, and space.
I realized there’s more to mediation during a build process than just guiding clients through the logistics. There’s a psychology to working with people, and I was pretty good at that. But I wondered: How can we use objects and design to improve relationships and mental health?
Sam’s book was one of the [00:04:00] premier resources that helped me dive deeper into understanding our connection to spaces and objects, and how they reflect who we are.
So, to our audience: This book is everything you’ve probably wondered about—the meaning behind the objects in our interiors and how they express who we are. Sam has not only written about this subject, but he’s also a premier researcher on what our stuff says about us.
With that said, Sam, I’d love to explore how you got into studying what stuff says about people. Let’s start there and see where the conversation takes us.
Sam Gosling: It was a kind of roundabout journey. Psychology is supposed to be the behavioral science, but if you look at what most psychologists actually study, it’s often reports of behavior—what people say they do. Of course, as we all know, what people say they do only loosely correlates with what they actually do.
Or, it’s the study of behavior in laboratory settings, which again only vaguely reflects what people do in real life.
I thought: Just as Sherlock Holmes looks for evidence of criminal behavior at a crime scene, we psychologists could learn about ordinary, everyday behavior by looking for evidence of it in people’s spaces.
I began to call this “behavioral residue.” For example, if you see a parking ticket lying on someone’s floor, it tells you something about the actions that person has performed—and perhaps a little about what they’re like.
So, I set up a study to examine living spaces. At the time, the participants were students or recently graduated individuals living in California. We went into their spaces to observe. That’s when I began to see that the residue idea accounts for only some of what’s in people’s spaces.
When you think about it, it’s obvious, but I hadn’t really considered it before. I realized how rich the connections are between individuals and the spaces they live and work in. These connections are bi-directional: Our spaces affect us, and we affect them.
I noticed that some objects inadvertently reflect our personalities, while others are placed intentionally to make us feel a certain way or to evoke specific thoughts. Still, other items are displayed to project an image of ourselves to others.
That experience made me deeply aware of how intricate and meaningful the human-environment interaction is.
Sam Gosling: I think the factors that drive those sorts of things are really the consequences of the types of beings we are. We are beings who have eyes in the front of our head. Evolutionarily, that means we feel safer when we have our back to a wall. It allows us to feel secure because we know that nothing is going to approach from behind—whether it’s danger or opportunity. It’s a well-understood fact that most people prefer to sit at a table where they can have their back to the wall, and where they can see the door or the window. They want to keep an eye on what’s going on and who’s coming in.
It’s kind of remarkable when you think about how office cubicles used to be designed. They placed people in cubicles where they had their backs to the people walking by. It’s incredible to think about it—essentially designing a space in direct opposition to how humans feel comfortable, with their backs exposed. It’s a monument to the blindness of design in some ways.
So, I think this preference is built into who we are. Let’s imagine, though, if antelopes were to go for coffee and do work, which of course they don’t, but if they did, they would have a very different experience. Antelopes are prey species, and for them, being in a corner would not feel safe. It’s quite the opposite of how we feel. Antelopes would probably go to the middle of the room, where they could see predators coming from any direction, and where they could escape if needed. So while it feels good to us to have our backs to a wall, it’s a completely different dynamic for prey species.
There could also be individual differences in how people sit. For example, introverts and extroverts might choose different spots, even if they both prefer having their backs to the wall. Introverts might choose a spot with less opportunity for social interaction, while extroverts might go for a place with more social potential, but still with their backs protected.
As for how we study these preferences, it’s important not just to talk about them but to gather actual data. I haven’t conducted a full study on cafe seating preferences, but I’ve collected a little data, not much. If I were to do it, I’d want to start by measuring hundreds of thousands of seating choices at a variety of cafes in different cultures and countries. This would help us identify the factors influencing these preferences. So that’s how I’d approach it—starting with a theory like the one I’ve presented, and then testing it with data. And I think that’s a key point for me: it’s okay to start a conversation or speculate, but when there’s disagreement, the scientific method gives us a way to decide between conflicting ideas.
Rachel Melvald: Right, and as you describe, the scientific method is key. It’s about gathering data in various cafes, with different people from different backgrounds, so we can create a rich database. This allows us to hone in on why people are attracted to certain seating choices based on the variables we select.
Sam Gosling: Yes, exactly. And it could be something universal, like the preference for having our backs protected. That could apply across cultures. But there might also be individual or cultural differences. For instance, in some cultures, status might be determined by how central to the room you sit, so people might choose a seat based on that.
One of the guiding ideas I keep in mind when thinking about how we relate to our spaces comes from Henry Murray, one of the founders of personality psychology. He said almost a century ago, “In some ways we’re like all other people, in some ways we’re like some other people, and in some ways we’re like no other people.” That idea is really important when thinking about how people interact with spaces.
Some of these preferences are so universal we don’t even think about them. For example, if you were to place a chair in a room, it would seem odd to put it right up against a wall, facing only the wall. It’s such an obvious preference that we don’t even question it. But it shows that some of these preferences are pretty universal, though perhaps not completely.
Then, as Murray said, we’re also like some other people. There are groups with distinct preferences—introverts versus extroverts, young adults versus older adults, people from different regions, or people with certain cultural backgrounds. There are differences within groups, too.
And then there’s the third way, where we’re like no other people—we’re truly individuals. Even if two people have similar homes, they’re not exactly alike. Our personal spaces are unique, but they’re not random or arbitrary. There’s usually a systematic process at play. For example, many people like to have what some people call “social snacks” in their spaces. These are reminders of special people, places, or times. You might have a picture of a loved one, or a keepsake from a meaningful event. While the specifics vary from person to person, this kind of personalization seems pretty universal. I might have a photo of my grandma, while someone else might have a pebble from the beach where they had their first kiss. So, even in our unique choices, we’re still following similar patterns.
Rachel Melvald: Yeah, that’s really actually so helpful in breaking down behavioral science, or just research. Because to me, like you’re saying, there are these three circles that while we’re searching for universal preferences, there are ways that we are going to all have that applied into the design space, such as how we are expressing ourselves differently.
And how you said, there’s universals, we’re not like anybody else, and that we’re a little like some other people.
Sam Gosling: We’re like all other people, some other people, and no other people. Yeah.
Rachel Melvald: And I love that because to me, I always thought, oh, we’re all the same, but we’re not, we want to express our unique selves.
And there’s that want and design and who we are as to be unique, yet we want to connect in the universal path of life of these archetypes and ways of being and preferring. Yes, that is so helpful.
Sam Gosling: And it’s also helpful, I find it, because, it’s easy to think if you don’t have the system, if you or I say, look, here are some kind of principles about design preferences or something like that, and then, sometimes the response is, well, you know, I like this and my husband likes that.
Or we point to differences in people’s preferences as though that is a refutation of the fact that there are these general preferences, but it’s not a refutation. It’s just saying, yeah, there are some ways in which we are more idiosyncratic, but that doesn’t undermine the fact that there are also some ways in which there are similarities.
Rachel Melvald: And given that example of a couple, which I’ve worked with that have differing design preferences in terms of style, texture look, feel, and maybe this is just a philosophical, or I don’t know if it’s a scientific question, but is it our goal and intention to bring a more universal solution to these design conflicts or to allow a negotiation in that?
Sam Gosling: I mean, I don’t know. That’s your field, not mine, but my guess would be that it depends on the nature of the relationship, right? If it’s the sort of relationship where the partners enjoy and perhaps celebrate differences within them.
And, where they may go off and do their own activities and have their own friends, that might be reflected in a space, versus a couple where they really want to focus on their commonalities and the togetherness and the things, then I imagine there would be more of a need to try to find the common ground, right? You know if that was still work with neither of them wanting to differentiate themselves in any way, so, you know, I could see it. I mean, again, you should be telling me the answer to this question.
I was just wildly speculating.
Rachel Melvald: But it is interesting because I think what I’m evaluating, there’s so many ways to assess and treat these situations. And one hat, I’m looking at how people can heal in their spaces, and I look at what you used as a powerful word is differentiation. And a lot of family systems therapy, based on Bowenian family therapy, we’re looking to individuate and differentiate from our family of origin or in our own self-development.
And Carl Jung would say it’d be the integrative self.
And when you’re looking at that trajectory of self-development in the space, I look at and assess people who are continually wanting to individuate in their careers and who they are as a person, yet they’re merged in these couplehoods.
And it is, for me, important to support somebody’s continued individuation, but how they are differentiating from these earlier systems. And it’s interesting how that happens in a child’s room when they become a teenager, right? You’re showing in their design or how you choose certain different objects based on that.
So there’s so much clinically working with people that you’re evaluating. And what I think is important in your research is that you’re looking at personality and you’ve created scales in personality types. And we can use that as a guiding light to say, okay, are you, and I’m just referencing your big five personality profiles: Openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
Sam Gosling: That’s right. Spells OCEAN. That’s how you can remember.
Rachel Melvald: Oh, I love that. Okay. That makes it much easier.
Sam Gosling: Yeah, the Big Five framework is kind of like Myers-Briggs or the MBTI. It was created by two non-professionals, who were incredibly insightful, intelligent, and thoughtful, but who had no scientific training or background, really. They created, given the lack of background, a remarkably good instrument. However, you can think of the Big Five as what they would have created if they had scientific training and background. That’s one way of thinking about it.
You know, the MBTI isn’t that bad. It’s just that it’s not quite measuring the right things. So, the Big Five suggests that there are these five broad dimensions of personality traits. Each one is very broad, even though it only has a single word as a label. But it captures several narrower facets.
For example, take something like extraversion. Extraversion does include what you and I think about when we think of extraversion—people who are socially engaged, socially oriented, and enjoy social activity and opportunities. But it also includes other traits, such as cheerfulness, or positive emotions. It includes things like people being more active, more assertive, or more dominant than others in interactions.
When I say it includes those things, what I mean is that empirically, these traits tend to be correlated. And that’s where the Big Five came from. Before the Big Five, personality psychologists around the world were interested in narrow, individual personality elements. For example, one person might be interested in creativity, while someone else is focused on anxiety. So there were hundreds of different scales.
Then, as a science, we were left wondering: how many of these scales do I need to measure a person’s personality? Do I need a hundred? Twenty? Ten? One? How many real personality dimensions are out there?
So, the Big Five came from essentially analyzing thousands and thousands of different personality questionnaires and seeing, “Ah, in fact, these hundreds of different scales really fall into these five broad dimensions.”
Rachel Melvald: Oh, that’s fascinating. So, are you saying that—yes, because I did hear this—the Myers-Briggs isn’t an empirically validated tool, right? And you developed these five…
Sam Gosling: I didn’t develop them. But, yeah, the Big Five really started appearing in the late 80s and early 90s. Over a couple of decades, it really became established as the most well-respected and widely used system for understanding personality traits.
Rachel Melvald: Oh, that’s fascinating.
Sam Gosling: And that’s important because one of the values of science is being cumulative. That means if there are hundreds of different people and thousands of different researchers doing research, if we’re all using the same personality scales, we can begin to look for patterns and combine our findings. Whereas, if one person is studying creativity and another is studying ingenuity, we might wonder, “Is that really the same thing, or isn’t it?” So, before the Big Five, it became very hard to be cumulative. This common currency of the Big Five essentially emerged, and that’s why it’s important.
So, it’s an important starting point, and I think you’re right—it’s a helpful framework for understanding people: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Which, I’m happy to talk about if you want, but also, I don’t know where you want to take this.
Rachel Melvald: Well, yeah, I guess, because personality defines so much of how we express ourselves… I guess I’m going back to my first psychology class. Is personality the same thing as character? How would you differentiate somebody’s character? Is their personality their temperament versus who they’ve developed to be, I guess?
Sam Gosling: Yeah. I would see character and personality as pretty similar. People typically differentiate temperament as these primarily biologically inherited, early-appearing tendencies. If you take an infant and put them in an unusual situation, some infants will be very alarmed by that, and some won’t worry at all. So, that would be a kind of temperamental difference, right?
How we normally conceive of personality is as the interaction between an individual’s temperament and their experiences through life—much of which is influenced by the physical environment, the cultural environment, and various other factors that happen during maturation.
When I’m teaching about personality in my introductory courses, I define it with a very broad definition, which is generally accepted by most people: an individual’s characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that are consistent over time and across situations. So, that’s one way you can think about it.
Rachel Melvald: Great definition.
Sam Gosling: Yeah, I think that’s a useful framework. The key elements are what it captures—thinking, feeling, and behaving—and the idea of consistency. Because we can all be very anxious at a given moment when something happens to us or there’s an alarming situation. But unless we are anxious over time and across situations, we wouldn’t say that’s our personality.
Rachel Melvald: Right. Across time is always the key, right?
Sam Gosling: Yes, it’s stability. Now, I should say, though, that in scientific circles and much of psychology, the Big Five really is only talking about personality traits. These are regularities in thinking, feeling, and behaving. But there’s more to personality than that. There are things that are less about behavioral tendencies—things that are more contextualized.
For example, our goals, values, opinions, and attitudes. These things are much more contextualized. In your role, you might be a brother, a son, a teacher, and so on. The things you value—your attitudes and opinions—might be very much affected by moment-to-moment events, which then change your attitude or opinion. That’s a kind of deeper level of personality that’s studied less in psychology, although it should be studied more.
And you can go even deeper and think about the deepest level of personality: the sense of identity. That is your story—the one you tell about yourself that gives your life coherence and meaning. It’s how you weave together the things that have happened to you in the past to make sense of them and tell a story about how you became the person you are, and, by implication, who you will continue to be or where you might go in the future. I think that’s also very important.
And I think that’s very relevant to men, although, again, it hasn’t been studied nearly as much as the Big Five and the personality traits. But I do think it’s incredibly relevant, especially when considering how people may want to individualize their living and working spaces.
Rachel Melvald: Right, because, like you say, personality is how we think, feel, and behave consistently.
How we imbue that, or how we express that and live it in certain roles, demands a whole different host of ways of being—as a mother, teacher, brother, friend—and it’s connected to the greater integration of our story, our meaning, and what is meaningful. It’s almost like the highest—though I don’t know if this is a hierarchy—level of personality?
Sam Gosling: It is a hierarchy, yeah, I think so.
Rachel Melvald: Okay, yeah. Kind of like in Maslow’s hierarchy, it’s how we give meaning to what we do. And like you’re saying, I think that’s my greatest interest in working with space: How do we merge that or support that in someone’s environment? How can we show that story of leading a meaningful life that reflects them?
Sam Gosling: Yeah. I mean, as you know, from our previous discussions, I’ve been incredibly influenced by the work of the architect, Christopher Travis, and what he’s doing, because I think his work is really one of the few, people who really takes psychology seriously in his work, and part of his work is understanding people’s story they tell about themselves and saying, okay, very explicitly, where did you come from? How do you feel about your parents? What are important times in your life? What are important objects in your life? What were important experiences that we can try to evoke in your current place and create spaces for the objects that have contributed to your life story.
So I think, it’s really that kind of a deep understanding of a person and how that person might want to be in a space that drives a lot of the steps he goes through in his process.
Rachel Melvald: Because you’re really taking stock of somebody’s personal history. And what is their design history? What is their memory of place of how they were raised? What aspects of that home? And it’s so interesting I don’t know if there’s any studies of how many people do repeat that preference of home since their beginnings.
Sam Gosling: Yeah, Christopher Travis asks questions about things like, tell me about a time when you felt protected or tell me about a time when you felt provided for, tell me about a time when you feel loved. The really interesting thing there is that he’s not asking at all about any element of the environment. He’s not saying tell me about a house or materials you like or anything like that. He’s asking just about what are your early experiences like, and so people will give answers. I remember, coming to my grandparent’s home and feel of the warm gravel on my feet or whatever it is they say, which he can then use to help him in the design of the place, but he said to me that he thinks that often kids get taken to their grandparents, at a moment where they’re stepping out of the normal kind of stresses of everyday life, often where they’re pampered.
So he says often, of course, not always, that being at a grandparent’s house is a place where many happy memories are formed for many people. And they mention that when he says, tell me about a time you were loved or provided for. And they bring up those elements. And so then those elements are built into the space. So although people aren’t deliberately trying to recreate a space of their childhood, they are indirectly doing so through the process that Travis uses.
Rachel Melvald: Which is really what we want to bring into our home space as a healing space because it is quite often, when was a time we felt nurtured? How did we feel loved? And this is actually quite interesting. I might’ve even shared this with Travis, but I had a client once and I work a lot in the art world, curating and buying art for collectors and design and we found this Picasso and it was so interesting in the journey of finding what art he would want he broke down and started crying. This was the first print I saw in my mom’s home, and said he went to my grandfather. I think he was the only person that really truly loved me, and we look at Jungian analytical psychology, like the image, and I do this a lot with trauma recovery work that I do, that image can really break through. And reveal that place and that’s where we kind of go back to so I really appreciate someone like you as a scientist kind of going into how do we feel safe? How do we feel loved? How do we feel nurtured? And almost the space becomes an embodiment of the womb, so to speak.
Sam Gosling: Yeah, feeling safe, provided for, and loved.
Rachel Melvald: So, Sam, I could really go on for hours and take your courses, and I wish I could study with you at your university. Your students are so lucky to have you as a professor. And this is so fascinating and so important as to how we understand people and how we are creating our spaces. I just feel so fortunate and blessed and thank you so much for your generous time.
Sam Gosling: Yeah. Well, thank you for having me on and the important work that you do.
Rachel Melvald: Yes, that we’re all doing and collaborating and, maybe there’s going to be a time and space for an Antelope Cafe that we could design?
Sam Gosling: I hope so! I hope so.
Rachel Melvald: I think that would be just so great to see these antelopes, you know, sitting in a cafe.
Sam Gosling: The lions do too.
Rachel Melvald: Oh, yes. And the lions do. Yes. So I would love to have future conversations with you. I hope to continue to bring your science into the world and what we do as designers and therapists and healers of the like. So, thank you.
Sam Gosling: Yeah, of course.
Rachel Melvald: Oh, and one last question. I know you have labs. Do you need people to join your labs or where should people go?
Sam Gosling: No, we don’t really need participants right now. If people want to find out more about the research we’ve done and doing, the best place would be to look on my webpage or on my Google Scholar page that you can see what we’ve been publishing.
Rachel Melvald: Okay, wonderful. And of course the book, Snoop, What Your Stuff Says About You everyone should get this and or who care about there’s space and who really loves objects and museums and art. I think this is so, so needed. So thank you, Sam, and I wish you well in your continued research pursuits and hope to be in touch.
Sam Gosling: Yep. Looking forward to speaking to you next time.
Rachel Melvald: Okay. Take good care. Bye bye.
