The Book
Enter Dr. Sam Gosling, University of Texas professor, and author of Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You. Although Snoop primarily focuses on gleaning personality insights from physical locations such as cubicles, music collections, bookshelves, and dressing areas, Gosling also explores email monikers, personal websites and profile pages.
The results of this inquiry confirm many deeply held assumptions and have important ramifications for e-Me and personal branding.The Study
Gosling’s model divides an individual’s personality into five OCEAN traits including Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Study participants used this model to describe themselves both as they are (actual self-reports) and as they’d like to be (ideal self-reports).
Researchers then recruited judges who relied solely on a participant’s website to form impressions of the individual along the same OCEAN traits. The judges’ reports were compared to the individual’s actual and ideal self-reports to produce insights into how well our online presence truly represents us.
