Social Media and Personality

Monday, November 17, 2014

Sam Gosling | Robin Edelstein

University of Texas | University of Michigan

How are we connected to the spaces in which we live and work? How do our living rooms, bedrooms, offices, music collections, and Facebook profiles reflect what we are like and, more fundamentally, who we are? We are so tightly bound to our living and work spaces that many of the connections linking people and places go unnoticed. But these environments are rich with information about our values, attitudes, preferences, and personality. This talk will present the result of a decade’s worth of research unraveling the links between people and places and figuring out what they mean. Some clues—the Martin Luther King poster on the office wall or the high-brow books left casually lying on the coffee table—are deliberate (but not always disingenuous) signals directed towards others about how we would like to be seen. Other clues—the music on your iPod or the disarray in the office-desk drawer—are inadvertent reflections of our styles of feeling and thinking and of our history of behavior. Together, these studies of physical, aural, and virtual environments illuminate the intimate bonds between people the worlds they craft around themselves.

Web:
http://rcgd.isr.umich.edu/seminars/Fall2014/articles/Edelstein_Morey_2013.pdf
http://rcgd.isr.umich.edu/seminars/Fall2014/articles/Gosling_Back_Psych_Science_2010 Facebook_profiles.pdf