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  • How we arranged and organized our rooms can say a lot about us.

  • For many of us, our bedrooms are the most personal and intimate spaces in our home.

  • Colors and smells can give away your sensory interests and small decorations can hint at your taste and personal style.

  • For example, a messy room can mean that you're disorganized while a very neat and clean room can suggest that you're uptight.

  • In Malcolm Gladwell's acclaimed book "Blink", he references Samuel Gosling, a personality and social psychologist,

  • who studies how people's behavior, appearance and physical environment affects how they're perceived.

  • Gosling names three variables in a bedroom that gives out clues to a person's personality, identity claims, behavioral residue, and thoughts and feelings regulators.

  • An Identity Claim is a deliberate expression about how you want to be perceived by others.

  • For example, putting your favorite books on a shelf serves as an identity claim.

  • Because the people who enter your room can instantly get a good perspective of the things you're interested in.

  • Behavioral residue on the contrary is the unintentional results of your behavior.

  • If you leave your shoes scattered around the floor. It's probably because you're lazy you didn't intentionally leave them there to give the impression that you're unorganized.

  • Thoughts and feelings regulators are objects that affect the way you feel in your room.

  • Candles that you put on top of your desk to give your room a calm feeling is an example of a thoughts and feelings regulator.

  • So, if a stranger enters your room and takes a look around, they'll be able to gather certain aspects about your personality just by observation.

  • Gosling proved this in an experiment involving eighty college students using a highly respected questionnaire called the big five inventory which measures people across five dimensions.

  • One: Extraversion, are you sociable and fun-loving or retiring and reserved?

  • Two: Agreeableness, are you trusting and helpful or suspicious and uncooperative?

  • Three: Conscientiousness, are you organized and self disciplined or disorganized and weak weld?

  • Four: Emotional stability, are you worried and insecure or calm and secure?

  • Five: Openness to new experiences, are you imaginative and independent or down-to-earth and conforming?

  • He first had close friends of those eighty college students fill out the questionnaire,

  • then he had another group of total strangers who had never met the eighty college students go into their dorm rooms,

  • and along with the clipboard and 15 minutes to look around told them to fill out a very similar questionnaire.

  • The close friends of the college students calculated their friends extraversion and agreeableness way more accurately than the strangers,

  • which make sense because you have to personally know somebody in order to make a better judgment of his or her personality,

  • but surprisingly the strangers did a far better job than the students' friends at predicting conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to new experiences.

  • This demonstrates that it is possible for people who have only known you for a short time to learn a lot about you.

  • Just and also by looking around your bedroom.

  • Little details like having a bottle of sleeping pills on your desk which suggests that you have trouble with falling asleep,

  • or leaving clothes and unfinished food all around your floor which hints that you don't have time to stay organized can say a lot about your passions, desires, work, and psychological state of mind.

  • Now look around your room and try to take note of any objects that can potentially reveal parts of who you are.

  • Which objects do you think most strongly portray your personality? Comment your answers down below.

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  • Thanks for watching and have a wonderful day.

How we arranged and organized our rooms can say a lot about us.

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