A Room With a Cue

Study shows your personal surroundings can tell people much about who you are

THURSDAY, March 7, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- Having trouble attracting a mate? Try vacuuming your bedroom.

Want to get that job promotion? Organize your desk and dump the clutter.

The reason: A new study says that even total strangers can puzzle out your personality based on nothing more than the appearance of your personal space.

In a report published in the current Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers revealed that "personal environments" like your bedroom or your work space often reflect major personality traits, even when viewed by those who don't know you at all.

"We found that at least two of the five major personality traits -- conscientiousness and openness -- were evident when looking at a stranger's bedroom. And people were awfully good at judging extroversion when looking at the personal office space of someone they never met," says study author Samuel Gosling, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Although Gosling says the observers were often correct in their assumptions, the study shows they sometimes took their clues from objects that indicated gender and race -- a fact that psychologist Jason Kornrich finds almost as interesting as the study itself.

"The study was interesting and very well done, but it was also very intriguing to see how the observers reverted to clues from gender and race to try to put a personality to the room they were viewing," Kornrich says.

This, he adds, may tell you how often, without even realizing it, you could be relying on stereotyped images to help you form opinions of people you either don't know or have just met.

"I think this is something we all need to be more conscious of when forming an opinion," Kornrich says.

The study, which was divided into two parts, involved a total of 15 observers. Each was asked to rate the personalities of total strangers, using the "Big Five" personality traits of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and emotional stability.

The key, however, was that they were asked to make those assessments based only on looking at a personal office or bedroom. There was no contact with the people whose rooms they viewed.

Eight of the observers looked at 94 offices belonging to employees in five professions: banking, real estate, architecture, advertising, and one business school. The other seven looked at 83 bedrooms belonging to college students or recent graduates living on or near a college campus.

The observers were then asked to determine to what degree each of the five major personality traits were present in each of the people who occupied the bedrooms and offices.

The researchers then compared how often each of the observers agreed with one other, as well as how accurate their assessments were. Then the researchers compared those observations to how the people being studied rated themselves, as well as how they were rated by people who knew them.

The end result: Not only did almost all the observers agree with each other about the personalities of the people whose rooms they looked at, those assessments were considered highly accurate, particularly regarding the traits of openness and agreeableness, and in business, extroversion.

"I knew, and other people sort of indicated, they formed opinions based on a person's surroundings. But we had no idea that those opinions would be as accurate as they turned out to be. That was the surprise," Gosling says.

While most of the observers said they took their cues from looking at personal items in the rooms, along with decorating style, neatness and level of organization, there was one level of observation that remained a mystery, even to the study authors.

"People [doing the observing] were pretty good at detecting someone's emotional stability -- if they were a jittery person, or if they cried a lot. But there didn't seem to be any indication of how they knew that. And we still don't know," says Gosling.

While similar studies have been done utilizing photographs of rooms, Gosling's was the first to use on-site observations, with no biographical information about the person involved. Even personal photographs were covered up or removed to keep the identities of those being observed a secret.

For Kornrich, the study provides important clues as to how others see you -- and how you are judged.

"No one likes to think of themselves as being judged by how they look or by their surroundings, but this study shows people can -- and do -- make assumptions based on those factors, and that in at least some of the cases, those assumptions are accurate," says Kornrich.

What to Do

For a look at the "Big Five" personality traits, visit The Center for Applied Cognitive Studies.

For information on which personality traits affect job performance, visit The American Psychological Association.

For a fun quiz to help determine your personality traits, check out CrossTraits.com.

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