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Find out what your stuff says about you! Send a photo of your bedroom, bathroom or office to snoop.newscientist@gmail.com by 10 July. Sam Gosling will analyse a selection of photos and his personality predictions will be posted on 22 July.

EVER wondered what your handshake, your CD collection, or even the way you walk says about you? Or perhaps you have always wanted to be able to glance at a colleague’s office and instantly gain a stunningly accurate insight into their personality. If so, is for you. In this charming and well-written book, academic psychologist brings a mass of research to bear on a simple question: just how much can you really tell about a person from their possessions, living spaces and non-verbal behaviour?

Central to much of the work is the view, now held by many psychologists, that personality consists of : extroversion, emotional stability, openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness. The usual way of scoring someone for each of these parameters involves asking them to complete a long and tedious questionnaire. Gosling, however, argues that there are much quicker, yet still surprisingly accurate, ways of assessing your friends, family and colleagues. All you have to do is snoop.

These five personality traits, Gosling says, manifest themselves in almost every aspect of our daily lives. Take, for example, the bedroom. In one classic snooping study, Gosling and his colleagues fearlessly entered the bedrooms of college students and carefully rated them on various scientific scales: were there numerous pairs of underpants strewn across the floor? What types of posters were on the walls? Were lots of books on show? What magazines were hidden away under the bed? (I made this last one up.) Next, they compared the students’ personalities with their bedroom ratings, and discovered several fascinating correlations.

You might think that highly creative types (creativity is often seen as an important facet of “openness”) would have books and magazines covering every inch of floor space, and that friendly people would decorate their rooms in warm colours. You would be wrong on both counts. In fact, according to the analyses, it is the variety, not quantity, of reading material that is the real giveaway of a budding Leonardo, while colourful walls are not indicative of friendliness. Inspirational posters, by the way, are signs of emotional instability.

“Inspirational posters are signs of emotional instability”

Snooping, though, is not always straightforward. Advanced snoopers can distinguish between the image a person is trying to project and who that person really is. For instance, you can quickly tidy up your room when you are expecting visitors, but there’s no faking true organisation. By-products of our behaviour (like a wilting plant in the corner) rather than explicit signals we provide (like a prominent photo of Karl Marx hanging above a desk) are more telling of our true personalities.

Such insights are what make Snoop such a readable and practical guide to understanding the people around you. Whether it is discussing the music they listen to (fans of rock music tend to be less friendly than most), the words they use (neurotics tend to employ a high frequency of first-person singular pronouns, like “I”, “me” and “my”), or the state of their car’s brake pads (Gosling speculates that anxious people wear out their brakes more quickly than those with a relaxed view of life), Snoop points out the revealing signals that we unknowingly emit all the time. Some insights may seem a tad obvious (people with a firm handshake tend to be more extroverted than their loose-wristed friends, while narcissists tend to wear expensive clothing), but the majority of the work is fascinating.

With this book, Gosling joins a small but growing band of scholars who are keen to present to the public the important and practical insights that can be gained from experimental social psychology. Unlike many current books on behaviour, Snoop does not contain a single brain scan or discussion of neural activity. Instead, it adopts a shamelessly social approach, focusing on how people behave in the real world rather than in a brain scanner, and presents explanations at the level of individual personalities and social interactions. It works, not least because it has the huge advantage of being exclusively concerned with the one topic that most people find endlessly fascinating: themselves.