The WELL: inkwell.vue.334: Sam Gosling, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

#50: Sam Gosling (samgosling) Wed 3 Sep 08 23:32

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 23:32:00 PDT

Thanks David and all for your great questions/ideas/thoughts. [Read entire topic]

#49: Sam Gosling (samgosling) Wed 3 Sep 08 23:31

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 23:31:00 PDT

Sharon, yes. Personality traits, like sociability, curiosity, anxiety, etc., are what Dan McAdams calls "the psychology of the stranger," good for a first read on a person. They tell you about regularities in the person's patterns of behaving, thinking, and feeling. These traits are what the Big Five personality dimensions capture. They are useful if, say, you want to know if someone would be an effective employee or roommate or colleague. But if you really want to know that person, Dan McAdams claims (and I agree with him) that you need to delve deeper. If you dig below traits you get to a person's values, goals, roles, etc. And if you keep digging beyond that, you get to person's identity--his or her sense of who she is, which consists of a story we tell about ourselves with a sense of where we came from and where we're going. I think people's spaces are interesting because they often allow you to get at this kind of identity related information. Chapters 2 & 3 of my book deal with these ideas. [Read entire topic]

#48: David Adam Edelstein (davadam) Wed 3 Sep 08 14:42

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:42:00 PDT

Thanks for a great conversation, Sam! [Read entire topic]

#47: (dana) Wed 3 Sep 08 11:38

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:38:00 PDT

This has been a fascinating discussion, and while it doesn't have to end now, we'll be turning the virtual spotlight on a new conversation this week.

Thank you, Sam and David. Please feel free to stick around as long as you like. [Read entire topic]

#46: Sharon Brogan (sbmontana) Wed 3 Sep 08 10:45

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:45:00 PDT

Could you expand a bit on that? The differences between personality/ traits and identity? [Read entire topic]

#45: Sam Gosling (samgosling) Wed 3 Sep 08 03:11

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 03:11:00 PDT

I think a lot of fascinating questions remain to be examined, many of which we've touched upon in these discussions. For example, I think some of the issues surrounding culture have a lot of potential; I'd be interested in empirically examining how these connections between people and their spaces play out across different cultures.

I'm also being increasingly drawn to examine the many virtual environments that are playing larger and larger roles in our lives. What psychological needs are being met by the social networking sites that now occupy huge amounts of time and energy in some circles? What's the appeal of the virtual worlds found in second life and multi-player online video games? It seems somewhat odd that the former has floundered but interest in the latter has soared. Some of our initial findings are suggesting that there is no one motivation driving people to participate in these activities: Some people (extraverts) use the games primarily to interact with others but others use them primarily as a procrastination strategy that makes the use feel vaguely productive. And what's going on with the characters that people use to represent themselves in these spaces?

Within the environments I have studied, I'd also like to look more closely at issues of identity. The vast majority of studies in the past have looked at traits (like the big five) because they are easy to measure. But, identity, which presents a much bigger challenge to measure, has been relatively neglected. But to me identity is one of the richest untapped seams in psychology so I'd love to do more work on this topic. [Read entire topic]

#44: David Adam Edelstein (davadam) Mon 1 Sep 08 21:55

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:55:00 PDT

Uh, oh, my notes failed me. There it is in the book, of course.

We're coming to the end of our two weeks, pretty soon, and I wanted to make sure we talk about the future a bit. What's on the horizon for this field? What's there left to look into? [Read entire topic]

#43: Sam Gosling (samgosling) Sun 31 Aug 08 15:44

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 15:44:00 PDT

David, Narcissism is not one of the big five dimensions. But different personalities do see the world (including other people) differently. As you might expect, people high on agreeableness tend to be more charitable in their views of others (even when rating other big five variables) than less agreeable people. Also, a robust finding is that people tend to see others as they see themselves; but note this is only a tendency, so it's not like we see all others as being exactly like ourselves but on average, extraverts see others as more extraverted than introverts do, open people tend to see others as more open than closed people do, etc. --some researchers have framed this effect in terms of projection. [Read entire topic]

#42: David Adam Edelstein (davadam) Sat 30 Aug 08 22:55

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 22:55:00 PDT

For those of you who haven't read the book, I do recommend the link Sam posted earlier -- (http://www.personal.psu.edu/~j5j/IPIP/). Seeing myself reflected in the "big five" really helped to illustrate them for me.

Of course it may reflect some level of narcissism on my part that when I take a test of this sort, I measure the reliability by how closely it matches my own self-image :-)

On the subject of narcissism, I was fascinated by the over-claiming questionnaire, and the idea that people high in narcissism are so sure of their own opinion that they will actually disagree about which people on the test actually exist.

Do you find the same pattern in people high in the other four of the Big Five characteristics? Do people high in agreeableness delude themselves about whether a person is agreeable in return, for example? [Read entire topic]

#41: Sam Gosling (samgosling) Sat 30 Aug 08 18:25

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 18:25:00 PDT

Right. A lot the labels used for the big five personality dimensions are quite confusing because they overlap only partially with how the words are used in ordinary everyday language. Openness is a great example because it's thought to mean openness to people, as Sharon suggests, and also it also sometimes means flexible (as in a pushover). But as Sharon notes the big five definition is really about intellectual openness--to ideas and experiences. So you could be open to people but closed in terms of the big five openness. You could also be open and closed at the same time by having different scores on facets within the broader dimension--generally high on most the openness facets but low on one or two. [Read entire topic]