ended up doing a much better job. What this suggests is that it
is quite possible for people who have never met us and who
have spent only twenty minutes thinking about us to come to a
better understanding of who we are than people who have
known us for years. Forget the endless “getting to know”
meetings and lunches, then. If you want to get a good idea of
whether I’d make a good employee, drop by my house one day
and take a look around.
If you are like most people, I imagine that you find Gosling’s
conclusions quite incredible. But the truth is that they shouldn’t
be, not after the lessons of John Gottman. This is just another
example of thin-slicing. The observers were looking at the
students’ most personal belongings, and our personal belongings
contain a wealth of very telling information. Gosling says, for
example, that a person’s bedroom gives three kinds of clues to
his or her personality. There are, first of all, identity claims,
which are deliberate expressions about how we would like to be
seen by the world: a framed copy of a magna cum laude degree
from Harvard, for example. Then there is behavioral residue,
which is defined as the inadvertent clues we leave behind: dirty
laundry on the floor, for instance, or an alphabetized CD
collection. Finally, there are thoughts and feelings regulators,