Snoop

In his great work The Characters, Theophrastus sketched thirty types—from the penurious and the garrulous to the flatterer and the shamelessly greedy—and illustrated his character portraits with an astonishing level of detail

ask yourself, not only what particular identity a person is shoring up but also what kinds of thoughts or feelings he or she elicits in doing so. Do the photos on display reflect feelings of success through work (driving a new Jaguar to a high-school reunion), of humility in presence of natural wonders (a campsite in the Atlas Mountains), of power by association (shaking hands with Bill Clinton), of connection with a romantic partner (a shot of the occupant embracing her spouse), or of the companionship conferred by a beloved pet (you and Rover sitting on a jetty looking out over the lake together)?

To understand why behavioral residue is so essential to our work, consider one useful definition of personality: An individual’s unique pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving that is consistent over time. If you alphabetize your book collection just once, that does not make you an organized person. If you try a new dish on a menu once, that does not suggest that broadmindedness is a part of your personality. For a behavior to be part of your personality, it should be something that you do repeatedly. To be truly organized, you must systematically shelve your books and keep putting them back in their proper places. Moreover, you should also organize your CDs and create folders for your e-mails and keep the corkscrew in the drawer assigned to corkscrews.

To be broadminded, you should try the unknown dish on the menu often, not just as a blip in your typically conservative eating repertoire. You should also prefer unconventional vacations to traditional ones, and you should enjoy risking an evening at an obscure dance performance rather than returning to see The Nutcracker year after year. Obviously, repeated behaviors leave more residue than the occasional aberration. Bedrooms and offices are often repositories of evidence for these repeated behaviors; that is, I believe, what makes them such good places to find out what people are like. The accumulated residue in a bedroom distills many more behaviors than could be recorded by an observer in an interview, or even after several meetings

The Garbage Project was founded by Rathje on the principle that, just as archaeologists have learned about ancient cultures by exploring ancient refuse, we can learn something about our own society by studying contemporary garbage. More than two decades before I started snooping around rooms and offices, Rathje, who has been called the Indiana Jones of solid waste, began deploying researchers equipped with protective suits, gloves, and masks to uncover clues in city dumps

Stuff salvaged from trash cans is particularly useful for two reasons. First, as the items are discarded they are also dismissed from the owner’s conscious consideration, so they do not receive the same kind of attention to managing impressions as the items still in play in pre-trash life. Second, the contents of a trash can reflect behavior that really happened, not just the kinds of things we think we might do one day. This distinction between what we have done and what we plan to do in the future brings us to a new class of behavioral residue: Not only can you detect past behaviors in physical spaces but you may also discover clues to anticipated behaviors.

Other classic unobtrusive measures include figuring out which museum exhibits are the most popular by counting how often the floor tiles in front of each one must be replaced, or by estimating the number of visitors from the number of nose prints on the glass in front of each exhibit—perhaps even estimating the ages of the viewers from the height of the prints

I use the term behavioral residue to refer to the physical traces left in the environment by our everyday actions. Sometimes it is the lack of an act that leaves a residue. The soiled empty coffee mug on your desk is residue of your not bothering to wash it. Not all behavior leaves physical remains. Smiling doesn’t, and neither does walking or talking. But the residue of actions that do leave their mark can tell us a lot about a person’s traits, values, and goals

However, one interesting clue stood out: inspirational posters. Apparently, anxious people high on neuroticism are using the self-affirmations and inspirational messages of posters to regulate their tendency to worry about things and become blue. The posters are a visual form of self-medication.

As we shall see in chapter 7, a glimpse of a person’s music collection can put you on the fast track to learning about his or her personality, political views, artistic tendencies, and even preferences in alcohol

Another place to look for discrepancies is in the differences between front and back yards. The back yard tends to be a place to spend time and relax. The front yard is where most people make their statements to the outside world. If you want to fly a flag, it makes sense to fly it in front of the house, not at the back. Front-yard spaces, which can be seen by anyone who passes by, also provide clues to homeowners’ personality