Living
Email
Print
Regular Stuff: Prof's book aimed at a general audience
ADVERTISEMENT
Published: May 31, 2008
AUSTIN, Texas
Sam Gosling is something of a rock star in the world of academia -- winner of the American Psychological Association's 2008 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, prominently cited in Malcolm Gladwell's international bestseller Blink, extensively quoted in a New York Times Magazine cover story.
So it makes sense that he looks the part of a rock star -- toothpick arms jutting out of rumpled white T-shirt, dirty-blond mane sprouting out of rumpled white head. He's a Jamie Hewlett cartoon brought to life and festooned with a doctorate and a tenured gig in the psychology department at the University of Texas.
Gosling, 39, is perfectly comfortable in the halls of academe, but he's equally at home at the Little City coffee shop in Austin, which he calls his "downtown office." Gosling lives a couple of blocks away and gets a lot of work done here.
We meet at 1 p.m. on a weekday, the beginning of a full afternoon schedule that includes a 2 p.m. meeting with an advertising copywriter who wants to pick Gosling's brain.
The occasion for our interview is the publication of Gosling's first book, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You (Basic Books, $25). As the Today show-ready title suggests, the book is targeted at the general reader, not the fellow scholars who read Gosling's daunting stream of academic papers, which are often cordoned off by such titles as "Construct Validation of a Short Five-Factor Model Instrument: A Self-Peer Study on the German Adaptation of the Ten-Item Personality Inventory."
"I think people are OK with it," Gosling said of his colleagues, who might look askance at an associate professor spending his time on a book for a popular audience. "Your tenure committee would wonder why you wasted your time doing that," he said in his half-swallowed British accent. "But now I have the luxury of tenure, which allows me to be able to go off and do the frivolous, self-indulgent activity of writing a book."
This isn't the first time Gosling has rebelled against the conventions of his profession. He initially made his reputation by studying the personalities of animals, which drew accusations that he was trivializing the field of psychology.
Gosling's view eventually prevailed, but he says that even as a young grad student studying neuroses in hyenas, the attacks didn't bother him.
"I kind of enjoyed raising eyebrows," he said. "It's part of my identity, I suppose, to do that."
These days, Gosling likely gets a bye because of his sky-high reputation. He's a prominent figure in at least three fields of research: the psychology of Internet use, the role of personality in animals and the investigation of social perception, which is how people "form impressions on the basis of how others behave, what they look like, and cues in the physical environment."
It's this last subject that forms the basis of Snoop, a smarter-than-average how-to book for readers who would like to do a better job of nosing around in people's bedrooms, offices and iPods.
"I'm sure you noticed when you read it a lot of it's about basic psychology," he said. "What is personality; what does it mean to know someone; how is it that we form impressions, try and create and manage impressions; how do we stereotype?"
Gosling got the idea for writing such a book while he was on fellowship at Stanford University a few years ago.
"I'm going to try and write a book, so I thought, let's just read some books to see how these sorts of science-y books are written. So I read (Malcolm Gladwell's) The Tipping Point, and the day after finishing it, I get a call from Gladwell saying, ‘Hey, I'm writing about your work!'" (This coincidence is a little less astonishing when you consider that, at the time, about 30 percent of the world's population was reading The Tipping Point.)
A professional relationship was established, so when Gosling finished the manuscript for Snoop he asked Gladwell how to find an agent.
"He said, ‘Well, send me your manuscript.'" A few days later, Gladwell's agent offered her services.
Gladwell helped with Snoop in other ways, as well.
"‘Your colleagues and your educated friends are the worst people to get feedback off on your book,'" Gosling said Gladwell told him. Such people are always looking for consistency, trying to determine if a book's argument coheres sentence by sentence.
The general reader, by contrast, will forgive everything if a book is interesting.
"When I was reading Blink, I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this says this here and this here and those are inconsistent messages,'" Gosling said. "And he was right -- I was frustrated by it. But nobody else cares about it. For most people, consistency is number 10 on the list."
This goes against Gosling's academic training in a hundred different ways, but he figures he was lucky to get the advice.
"Talk about somebody who you can't question about, ‘Is this the right thing to do?' It's like, whatever it is (Gladwell) does is the thing to do."
In the tradition of The Tipping Point and Blink, Snoop is a readable book filled with sharp insights -- some of which reaffirm common-sense ideas about how to judge someone's character, some of which overturn them.
Email
Print
