Golden Ticket

 

Thanks for reading the acknowledgements and appreciating my friends!

Here’s your Golden Ticket, Charlie. It’s better than a Fizzy Lifting Drink (and requires substantially less burping.)

This is an entire chapter I had to cut due to length issues. This would have gone between Chapter 3 (the part on first impressions) and Chapter 4 (about detecting lies). In it you’ll find the amazing story of Daniel Kish as well as how to read people – Sherlock Holmes style — based on looking at their home or office.

I’m sincerely thrilled to be able to share this with you because it took an awful lot of time to research and write, and it’d be a shame for it to go to waste.

Please enjoy!

 

Bonus Chapter

Daniel Kish can ride a bike.

He even goes mountain biking on dirt trails. He can skateboard. Yes, on his own. Hold on, hold on, this is going to blow you away: Daniel Kish can play soccer. And basketball. Pretty amazing, huh?

Whoops. Sorry. I forgot to mention something: Daniel Kish is blind. Not “sees poorly” blind or legally blind. “Doesn’t have eyes” blind. They were removed when he was a baby because of cancer. But Daniel Kish sees. He just sees differently. Very differently.

If you were next to Daniel, you might notice him making a steady clicking sound with his mouth. It’s how he sees. Growing up he couldn’t view his environment with his eyes like we do. He had to teach himself to see differently. So he began to have a conversation with the world around him. Those clicks are a human version of sonar. It’s echolocation – yes, just like a bat. And he’s mind-blowingly good at it. You could say that people who read lips hear with their eyes. By that logic, you could say Daniel sees with his ears.

He clicks his tongue and sound waves bounce off the things around him. His brain constructs an image of the world from the reflected sounds. Each click is a snapshot of the environment. More clicks, more snapshots. And with that he makes a mental map of his surroundings to navigate with. He can detect anything softball-sized or larger within hundreds of meters. He easily distinguishes size, shape, and distance by the reflected sounds. Buildings, trees and people all have different acoustic signatures, as do sedans, SUV’s and motorcycles. He can even tell the difference between materials: metal, stone and cloth all sound distinct. In an interview, Daniel said, “Echo-wise, people basically look like indistinct blobs. You get a general shape or height.” The echoes give him a 360-degree map of his surroundings. By clicking every couple seconds he can ride a mountain bike and easily navigate curbs, parked cars and traffic. Click, click, click and the world comes into focus.

How did he get such extraordinary abilities? And why don’t all visually impaired people do this? Believe it or not, he started clicking on his own as an infant. As a baby he intuitively realized it could give him information about his environment. Sound reflecting much more quickly on my right? Probably a wall. Better go left. Anyone can learn to do it. (Yeah, you too.) Many blind children start doing it on their own, just like Daniel. But they stop. The people around them say it’s not safe. They’re different. They’re blind. They need to be bubblewrapped from the world. To use a cane and to rely on others. To live very limited, dependent lives. And Daniel almost certainly would have stopped clicking too…

But he had an overprotective mother. Not overprotective of his safety, overprotective of his freedom. His freedom to do whatever any little kid should be able to do, sighted or unsighted. We’ll refer to her as “Momma Kish” because someone so special deserves a warm name. When she saw him clicking around the house she didn’t stop him. She just started referring to it as “his radar.”

Sadly, the world was not as open-minded as Momma Kish. So when “the blind kid” would be climbing people’s fences, neighbors would call the cops. The police would bring Daniel home and tell Momma Kish that a blind child can’t be allowed to do these things. It’s not safe. She’d nod her head. And the minute they were gone, she’d let Daniel out to explore again.

And explore he did. He learned he could hear the difference between traffic and people. He could hear the difference between how concrete driveways and soft lawns reflected sound. And if he counted them, he could know his exact location. This made it easy for him to deliver his mother’s Avon catalogs all around the neighborhood. It wasn’t until age 11 that a friend told him that he did what bats do. “There was no one to explain it, there was no one to help me enhance it, and we all just kind of took it for granted.”

Now I don’t wanna paint an inaccurate picture; his echolocation is mind-blowingly impressive, but not perfect. Noisy environments can be difficult, analogous to how bright lights obscure your vision. But for most challenges he finds a way. Momma Kish taught him to be adaptable, and never to give up. How does he play soccer? He puts the ball in a plastic bag. Tracking that rustling sound is no problem for his well-trained ears. But what’s most impressive is not how Daniel matches sighted folks – but in the areas where he exceeds them. In an auditorium he can find the exits quicker than we can. Sonar gives him a map of the entire room. You have to turn your head to look around. Maybe a couple times. He just clicks and the information comes to him. Or maybe the exit is around a corner. Can you see around corners? Daniel can. And when he and sighted friends go on late night hikes, sometimes they just turn of their flashlights and let him lead the way.

Daniel has always said he does not “feel” blind. And after neuroscientists studied him, they agreed: Daniel really does see. He just sees differently. The image you have of this book right now is not in your eyes, it’s in your brain. Your eyes pull the information from the world around you, yes, but the visual cortex of your brain constructs what you actually “see.” For Daniel, his ears receive the information from the world and then, like you, his visual cortex processes it to create an image. It’s the result of what neuroscientists call “cross-modal plasticity.” Examined through an MRI, his visual cortex has rewired itself to process sound waves instead of the light waves we use.

The final result is somewhat different due to the richness of the data, but both still create “seeing” in the brain. The quality of his images are roughly at the level of your peripheral vision. And his version of seeing is not a seamless stream like ours; it’s a collection of snapshots that come with each click. Imagine being in the dark and switching a flashlight on and off repeatedly. But since his flashlight uses sound instead of light, things are black and white, and a bit blurrier. On the flip side, he’s not limited by items that would block light-based vision; sounds bounce around. Daniel can step into a three-story house, let out a few clicks and “see” a map of the entire structure.

But he doesn’t have much time to be a lab guinea pig these days. He’s too busy instructing: “I have made it my life’s work to teach blind children how to empower themselves using echolocation, which I call flashsonar.” The slogan of his nonprofit, World Access for the Blind, is “Our vision is sound.” He hadn’t planned on doing this with his life. He was going to be a psychotherapist. But when he realized the limited lives most blind people were leading, he changed his path. 64% of visually impaired people are unemployed. Blind children are discouraged from taking chances. Daniel would become their Momma Kish. As he likes to say, not giving blind children a chance to engage with the world is “very shortsighted.”

It’s the blind leading the blind – no pun intended. Daniel actually is the first blind person to be certified as an orientation and mobility specialist. He and his fellow flashsonar coaches have now taught more than 15,000 people in more than 40 countries. “This is not aiming at making our students daredevils or ‘super-blind’ or anything like that. It’s really aimed at opening opportunities and helping students…to lead day-to-day lives.” And his students have gone on to impress the world. David Tseng went blind at 11. But thanks to Daniel’s training he received dual degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and is currently an engineer at Google.

You might think Daniel would have become rich by now, giving private lessons to the blind, selling books and filling seminars. But he hasn’t. Because he refuses to say no to any student. If they want to learn, he will teach them, regardless of ability to pay.

Not every blind child had a Momma Kish to tell them to see differently. But today many blind children have Daniel. As he likes to say, “While running into a pole is a drag, never being allowed to run into a pole is a tragedy.”

———–

No, we’re not going to be using echolocation to “see differently” so you can stop clicking now. But what if I told you the very best way to read people might be not to see them at all? After all, Grace Humiston never met Alfredo Cocchi, right? As we’ve learned, getting an accurate first impression face-to-face can be a mess of misinterpretation, our own brains working against us. So instead of evaluating in-the-moment behavior, what if we looked at the environments people create? When we’re face-to-face with someone we’re seeing them at that one slice of time, in that one context. We have no idea how many factors may be affecting their behavior. Meanwhile, homes and offices are stable – sculpted by deliberate choices, the desire to express oneself and repeated behaviors.

When we look at determining someone’s “big five” personality traits (the primary ones professional psychologists use because they are most fundamental, predictive and consistent) it turns out face-to-face encounters are good at telling you how extroverted and conscientious someone is. Meanwhile they’re terrible for determining emotional stability or openness to experience. But what if you get some time to poke around in someone’s office or bedroom? There, research says, you have a much better shot at determining all five. In fact, one study showed looking at someone’s home gives you impressions of their personality that are almost in the range of being an old friend. Remember Todorov, our Princeton face expert? You’d think it would behoove him to say it’s all about the face. Nope: “Our first impressions are more accurate if they come from seeing one’s office, bedroom, or personal website than from seeing or briefly interacting with the person.” And while trying to read people face-to-face passively (without interaction) was extremely difficult, reading environments passively got results. (That said, I’m not encouraging you to immediately go home with people to get to know them better.)

We’re not going to turn you into an interior decorator; you’re going to become an interior decoder. So we’ll call this one “The Interior Decoder Dictum™”:

Environments usually give more accurate personality information than face-to-face first impressions.

And environments don’t merely reveal those big five personality traits. Studies also show you’ll get good clues to their values, politics and even how narcissistic they are. The amount of research on what people’s environments say about them is deep and varied. Yes, there is a correlation between black-light posters and psychedelic drug use. Yes, if you analyze the proportions of male vs female headstones in local graveyards you’ll get insights on the amount of sexism prevalent in that city. No, I’m not making any of this up.

Now I know what some people are thinking: “Can’t they just fake it?” A totally fair point. The experts call this “impression management” and there’s no doubt that when friends are coming over we all tidy up or even put fancy books on display that we have no intention of reading. But maintaining a bulletproof charade around the house turns out to be harder than you think. Putting up a false front face-to-face for the duration of a first date or a job interview is easy by comparison. Saying you enjoy classic books is simple; accumulating a collection that would pass muster with someone who knows literature is another. Quickly shoving your mess into a closet and wiping down the countertops is simple, but for a messy person to fool a real neat freak can be harder than winning Olympic Gold. And sustaining the ruse over time (that’s a lot of dust on your treadmill, Mr. “Athlete”) can be near impossible.

Research in the area of “self-verification theory” confirms that to a surprising degree, we all want to be known, often even when it means not looking good. And because of ego and pride there are also things we don’t want to be known as. Music snobs would rather die than say they like certain bands. A fashionista would rather commit seppuku than have a pair of crocs in their closet. And dirty plates on the kitchen counter would send superconscientious people into anaphylactic shock. Convincing impression management is harder than you think.

That said, there are still challenges for us. Determining who they are, versus who they think they are, versus who they aspire to be, versus who they want to be seen as… Yes, this is a puzzle to be solved. Luckily, we have some powerful tools to help us, many of them developed by one guy. He’s not exactly Sherlock Holmes but he is British and he’s actually better than Sherlock – because he’s real. Sam Gosling is a professor at University of Texas at Austin and he specializes in exactly this area, what people’s surroundings say about them.

Sam’s found that, much like with first impressions, we’re instinctively pretty good at getting a grasp on someone’s personality from merely looking at their homes. But let’s boost our instincts with a cheat sheet from his research. We’ll do a quick breakdown of psychology’s big five fundamental personality traits and get some tips so we know what to look for. Remember the acronym OCEAN: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. And I guarantee you this: when we’re done you’re never going to look at someone’s home the same way again.

 

Openness to Experience:

You know people who are always open to trying something new – and others who order the same thing for lunch. Every. Single. Time. Guess who is higher in openness to experience? The key question you want to ask yourself to gauge someone’s home on this trait is “Does it look like they have a wide range of interests?” Variety of books is a great indicator. Maps, art supplies and distinctive, unique items are also a big clue. Remember, this is one of those traits that is far easier to determine by snooping than face-to-face.

Conscientiousness:

Are they flaky or anal? Look around and ask yourself, “How neat and organized is this place?” Conscientiousness is a fairly easy one to gauge, but most people also try to use impression management here. If you can’t see the floor because it’s covered with junk, that’s one extreme. Books ordered alphabetically with their own GPS sensors so they won’t get lost is another.

Extroversion:

Ask, “Was this place designed to welcome others and make them comfortable?” If the living room feels more like an inner sanctum, designed for one person alone, that’s a big ol’ introvert. Extroverts will often have plenty of comfortable seats for company. They may even have a bowl of candy in their office at work: bait with which to lure their prey.

Agreeableness:

Does Mr. Rogers live here or Dr. House? Disagreeable people aren’t necessarily evil or cruel, just blunt and more concerned with the straight dope than feelings. (I feel the need to stand up for my much maligned disagreeable brethren.) So ask, “Does this place look like the owner is interpersonally warm?” Yeah, this trait is more tricky to discern than the previous ones. In many environments it’s hard to detect but Sam’s studies show bedrooms usually give people a decent vibe. Research shows things related to rock music usually signal higher disagreeableness. Yes, it was far easier to gauge this in the era of CD’s. But Sam’s research proves something you probably already suspected – across the board, music preferences do say a lot about someone’s personality, and you can usually trust your instincts.

Neuroticism:

People who score high here often deal with negative emotions. They’re more frequently moody, stressed or filled with worry. Low scorers are calm and hard to fluster. (James Bond’s neuroticism level would be in negative numbers.) Ask, “Does this person need things to keep their mood up?” Like agreeableness, this one is harder to detect, both looking at surroundings and face-to-face. Keep an eye out for inspirational posters, positive self-affirmations and self-help books.

Now there are also two other things Sam looks for that can tell us a lot: “identity claims” and “feeling regulators.” Identity claims are things like shirts, flags, awards or tattoos that make deliberate statements about how someone sees themselves. Does this person want it to be known that they are patriotic, that they graduated from a top school, or that they’re a good mom? Identity claims will often tell you.

“Feeling regulators” are things of personal importance we use to manage our emotions. Pictures of family or friends are very common. Music and mementos are others. It’s telling to see what emotions someone values (“tranquility”) and what things provide them with that feeling (a bathtub decked out like a shrine). And some things serve as both identity claims and feeling regulators (the photo with friends on graduation day from MIT).

So our instincts are good and these tips can make us better – but how do we get Jedi-level? Like Daniel Kish, how do we learn to truly see differently? Sam has some tips for us. This isn’t radar; it’s Samdar. First, memorize this weird phrase: “TRENDS CONTROL the PUBLIC. TRASH FACEBOOK.” These are the 5 Samdar Jedi concepts that will quickly turn your “pretty good” instincts into superpowers

 

1) Trends, Clusters and Contrast

Don’t forget our mortal enemy: confirmation bias. You don’t want to lock on to one thing and make a decision. That only works in the movies. We need to hypothesis-test our ideas. People have plenty of one-off exceptions; we need to find the overall trends. When it comes to reading people, knowing what to look for is important but knowing what to ignore is even more vital. We want to find trends and clusters. Are the majority of things screaming conscientiousness, or just a couple of the more visible items? We want to study those discrepancies to see if they’re worth noting, to put them to the test before confirmation bias conveniently deletes them from our memory. What if I told you those health-focused cookbooks were gifts from mom and she was coming to stay this weekend? You’d know they’re prominently displayed to be nice, not because they necessarily say anything about the owner.

2) Control

Yes, the living room shows extroversion – but maybe their spouse decorated it. Would it be smart to infer anything from someone being a Mac user if it’s a company-issued laptop and the entire company uses Macs? Areas people have high control over can be very telling but places of low control can be very misleading.

You’ll learn more about her in her home office and more about him in his mancave than you’ll learn about either from looking at the living room. So use shared environments for contrast against a high control area like his mancave. The differences will be telling. The living room might be as welcoming and extroverted as Disneyland. And her office is similar. But is his mancave as inviting as Guantanamo Bay, with only one place to sit? Guess who the introvert is and who the extrovert is?

Identity claims are often very easy to control – so they are therefore also easy to fake. What to do? Sam breaks them down into 2 types: “other-directed identity claims” and “self-directed identity claims.” The distinction being “is this telling others who I am, or reminding myself who I am?” Are all those photos with family and friends in the home office pointed toward the sofa where guests are likely to sit? Bingo. That’s an other-directed identity claim. Or are they facing the person seated at the desk? Those are for them, not you.

So we want to be giving special attention to trends and self-directed identity claims in high control areas. And don’t forget to contrast: what differs between high control areas and low control?

3) Public vs Private

My front yard is immaculate. But is my backyard as well kept? Which one do you think would be a better indicator of my true level of conscientiousness? And if you contrast front and backyard you’d get an idea of how much I care about what others think of me.

So high control areas are silver, but high control private areas are gold. If the living room says one thing, but the bedroom says another, which one are you going to trust? And the contrast between the two tells you even more: who I am and who I want you to think I am. Desktop’s clean but open the drawers and everything’s a mess? Not as conscientious as they’d like to appear. You gonna trust that pristine leather-bound collection of Hemingway stories prominently placed on the coffee table in the living room or the dog-eared romance novel by the bed?

The bedroom of someone who lives alone is platinum. Sam’s research shows bedrooms will give you a good idea of where someone stands on all of the big five. And while you’re in there, check out the closet. Sam’s research points to some insights here too. Lots of dark clothes? Neuroticism. More formal clothing? Conscientious. Practical shoes, not expensive or brand name? Agreeable. Clothing that shows off a guy’s muscles or a girl’s cleavage? Narcissism.

4) “Behavioral Residue”

If there are a dozen concert ticket stubs on my desk, all dated from this year, would you think twice about whether I’m a music fan? Behavioral residue is physical evidence of the things we actually do – not what we say we do, or what we’d like to think we do. Those books are nice, but are the spines cracked? Well-thumbed with notes in the margins? Guitar has a layer of dust on it but the Xbox is still warm from having been played? Evidence of repeated behavior makes powerful statements about what we value and how we choose to spend our time, energy and money. A physics book on the shelf is one thing; a Nobel Prize in physics on the mantle is another.

And then there’s a type of behavioral residue that deserves special attention. It’s ubiquitous and some of the most scientifically valid stuff you’ll come across. It’s incredibly honest – even when its owner isn’t. The University of Arizona has had an enormous unit dedicated to its analysis for 50 years…

It’s trash. Want to read people accurately? Trash is your new best friend. Yes, the place you least want to look is the most telling. Yucky, smelly and bursting with unvarnished truth. You might hit “clear history” on your browser but you don’t sort your trash to make a good impression. Once it’s in the can, it’s never thought about again. And trash says what actually occurred. (If you have an alternate story about why that condom’s in there, I’d love to hear it.) Trash gets personal; like empty-prescription-bottle personal. Trash can even let you read someone’s mind. How many notes to self, reminders and discarded mail gets thrown in the garbage?

Identity claims can be easy to fake but behavioral residue is very hard to fake. Vegan cookbooks are nice but if I find meat scraps in the garbage multiple times, I know which one I’m believing. Extroverts aren’t going to have as many TV dinner boxes and introverts will probably have fewer restaurant receipts. (And after friends read early drafts of this book I have been shooed away from more trash cans then you can imagine.)

5) Check Facebook

We hear a lot of talk these days about how people only show their best selves on Facebook. There’s certainly a measure of truth to that but here’s something that may shock you: Facebook profiles accurately reflect their owner’s personalities. In fact, Sam’s research says they’re as telling or more telling than people’s bedrooms.(Which is good because it’s much easier to snoop on people’s Facebook profile than to sneak into their bedroom.) Screams from the peanut gallery: “But people can put up a false front!” A bit… but if you post things totally unlike you, you’re gonna get called out on it by your friends. And you know that. So it keeps you (mostly) honest.

Facebook is a good way to confirm or deny theories you come up with walking around their home. More contrast. More trends. In many ways it functions as behavioral residue as well, since you can potentially scroll back for years. Research shows 5 minutes on somebody’s Facebook page made study subjects able to answer questions as accurately as the owner’s partner could. HR folks, take note: Facebook profiles were also predictive of future job performance. Mark Zuckerberg’s creation also predicts grades better than IQ scores and personality tests – combined. Want to know if a guy is happy with his relationship? See if he has that line that says, “In a relationship with _____”. Research shows it has a strong correlation with relationship satisfaction. For women, it’s if she has the guy present in her profile picture.

Your natural instincts will get you pretty far. And for the Big 5, remember OCEAN. Give special attention to trends and self-directed identity claims in high control private areas. Don’t forget to contrast: high control vs low control, public vs private. Bedrooms and Facebook are gold. And trash doesn’t lie. I understand if you now want to completely redecorate your house. Or if you don’t want to invite me over…

 

Thank You

This officially concludes your Golden Ticket, Charlie. Sing along with me: “I have a Golden Tiiiiiiiiicket, I have a Golden Tiiiiiiiiicket…”

Thanks again for reading my book Plays Well With Others. And if you enjoyed it, please leave a review on Amazon here.

Aren’t Easter Eggs fun? Maybe there are more in the book. Who knows…?

Puckishly,

Eric