Dr. Sam Gosling of the University of Texas gave a presentation at a Psychology Department colloquium, this past Friday. Gosling discussed the expression and perception of personality in everyday contexts. In particular, Gosling examined how people interact with the various physical, virtual, and aural spaces they inhabit.
Gosling began his lecture by addressing the question of how personality is expressed in everyday life. To answer this, he reviewed his research on college dorm rooms. In these studies, Gosling recruited participants to enter an unknown individual’s room and assess what they thought the inhabitant was like. These reports were then scored by criteria measuring the “Big Five” personality traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN). After these values were obtained, they were compared to the results of a personality test administered to the occupant as well as questionnaires about the occupant given to two informants – friends of the occupant, in this case.
Gosling and his team discovered a surprisingly strong correlation between the personality test and questionnaries to the third-party assessments. This result suggests that people encode components of their personality into their environments and that other people can accurately decode these messages. Details such as how clean or organized a physical space is, whether or not pictures or posters are put up, and how books are placed on bookshelves offer insight into an individual’s personality. According to Gosling, “spaces reflect the accumulation of behavioral trends.”
This pattern extends to many spaces beyond the bedroom. Looking at over two decades of personality research from across the country, Gosling found that people’s traits vary according to some popularly held beliefs about geographic location: on average, East Coast (Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts) residents score highest for being high strung (neuroticism) while West Coast (California) residents score highest for being laid back (openness). This correlation provides support to the idea that people surround themselves with like–minded individuals, shaping their environments on a macro scale just as they do on smaller scales.
Next, Gosling examined what he calls “identity claims,” or direct statements an individual makes to others about who they are. In particular, Gosling sought to understand how virtual spaces like Facebook and other social media websites, due to the high amount of control they allow, changed the way people present themselves and their underlying personalities. The method they used was similar to their previous studies: they recruited participants to evaluate the profiles of unknown individuals and then compared the results with those of personality tests administered to the owner of the profile and questionnaires administered to two informants. They also asked the owner of the profile what his/her ideal self would be . Suprisingly, the results showed a stronger correlation between the third party assessment and the real characteristics of the profile owner than his/her ideal attributes. This demonstrated that online profiles did not mask the owners underlying personality—despite any attempts to show otherwise.
Finally, with regard to our aural environments, Gosling looked at how people’s music preferences could be predictive of their personality. In the experiment, he recruited volunteers to listen to the top 10 songs of other unknown participants and assess what they thought the person was like. In a similar fashion, Gosling compared this with tests administered to the participants whose songs were being listened to. While the findings demonstrated a weaker association when compared with other spaces, the relationship was still consequential, evidencing the variety of ways that people shape the world they inhabit.
Gosling has made significant progress in explaining the degree to which people encode their personalities in the variety of spaces they interact with and how well others can decode these characteristics. In the future, he hopes to explore to a greater extent how people use the areas they occupy to express themselves, and thereby yield deeper social insights.