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Sam Gosling, Ph.D., is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. His work has been widely covered in the media, including The New York Times,[…]
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What someone might learn from your paperweight.

Sam Gosling: I mean, for all of these things, there are no dead giveaways. And I think that’s a really important thing that we learned.   It is so tempting to say, okay, there was this clue- what does this mean? Right?

And it really doesn’t work like that, because personality involves consistency- consistency across time and situation- so you have to look for these trends because there’s many different reasons why you might have something in your space which may not be to do with really reflecting your personality. And so, as one of the things that we have learned to really look out for is the looking for trends across objects or items of- or the arrangement.

Recorded on: June 13, 2008.

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