noop S What Your Stuff Says About You SAM GOSLING A Member of the Perseus Books Group New York THREE k Getting to Know You this book in a public place If so sneak a peek over the cover and take a look at a stranger By definition you don t know much about this person But some people do To someone he is a cherished father a loving husband a devoted friend What does it mean to know someone What does it take to go from being a stranger to becoming a friend My colleague Jack was once a stranger to me Should you meet him he would strike you as affable and thoughtful And you d probably find him generous too when I was first introduced to him he invited me to lunch to hear about my latest research projects I soon discovered that he s talkative and intelligent After a few more lunches I learned a bit about his scholarly ambitions and how he felt about being a parent and a professor However as I continued to hang out with Jack I began to notice that the stories all seemed familiar even though they described different events Then one day it struck me why this was so Whether he was telling me about a presentation at an academic conference a squabble with a neighbor or how he fixed his car last week the narrative was always a variation on the same story line Despite the odds against me and the expectations by others that I would fail I persevered and succeeded and showed everyone else that I was right all along The recurring theme resonated with the way Jack saw the world around him and how he saw his place in that world And this view of himself was an important part of his personality After figuring out his theme I felt I knew Jack better I had gone to a deeper level A RE YOU READING 55 56 Snoop Getting to know a person requires that we find ways to jump from one level to another not just travel extensively at the same plane The psychologist who knows the most about the different levels of personality is one of my academic heroes Dan McAdams He s a brilliant and exceptionally creative professor at Northwestern University s School of Education and Social Policy and the author of the influential book The Stories We Live By Personal Myths and the Making of the Self I was pleased to bump into McAdams at a recent conference because I had been hoping to ask him something As soon as it seemed polite I hit him with my question Does Lynn exist A knowing smile materialized on his face Apparently he gets this question a lot because he immediately knew what I was talking about PERSONALITY THE LONG WAY One of the things I have long admired about McAdams is his refusal to shy away from the kind of deep issues that make life complicated McAdams loves to play in the sticky stuff His forays off the beaten track have yielded some of the most interesting discoveries in contemporary personality research His goal is to understand people in all their richness from a systematic scientific perspective He studies personality the long way meaning that he is interested in learning not only what people are like now but also how they became one way rather than another and ultimately how their past and present play into their future In a much admired article McAdams explores a question at the very heart of what personality psychologists most care about What does it really mean to know someone He begins by inviting the reader to imagine him and his wife driving home from a dinner party Before long their conversation turns to the other guests One of them a widely traveled freelance writer stood out from the others At first she intimidated McAdams I felt I couldn t keep up with the fast Getting to Know You 57 tempo of her account how she moved quickly from one exotic tale to another Add to this the fact that she is a strikingly attractive woman about forty years old with jet black hair dark eyes seemingly flawless complexion clothing both flamboyant and tasteful This was Lynn As the evening wore on McAdams and his wife found themselves warming up to Lynn as she revealed more about her life and history her values and feelings they realized they both wanted to know Lynn better This is the point at which McAdams poses his fundamental question What would he need to know in order to know Lynn better This is a powerful question because although we can all bring to mind people we know well and people we know superficially when we are forced to articulate what exactly distinguishes these two groups of people the veil of simplicity falls away Beyond miscellaneous facts he has a large collection of butterflies and historical details she went to school in Guyana it is hard to put your finger on what more you know about your inner circle of friends than about your acquaintances What is it in concrete terms that we know after a thousand days of knowing someone that we did not know on day one McAdams provides a good answer to this question Getting to know someone he says means progressing through three distinct levels of intimacy When he first met Lynn he thought about her in broad descriptors she seemed socially dominant extraverted entertaining dramatic moody slightly anxious intelligent and introspective These descriptors are traits and they constitute the first level of knowing a person The Big Five dimensions openness conscientiousness extraversion agreeableness and neuroticism describe people at the level of traits Traits come first in McAdams s scheme because they provide an efficient first read on someone When describing ourselves and others traits are the words we reach for first They can often be found at the beginning of personal ads Kind vivacious tolerant honest and 58 Snoop spunky I m fun smart sexy and open I m honest crass a little bit trashy a lot naughty and never ever dull Think about the words you might use to describe someone you have just met There s a good chance that your description will feature traits heavily terms such as curious friendly extraverted anxious and moody arise easily in the language of personality One study found that the most common words people used to describe themselves or others were friendly lazy helpful easygoing honest happy moody selfish and shy Words at the bottom of the list that is rarely used words included jittery dramatic reluctant and two faced And we re not species ist in our use of trait terms In one of my studies of dog personality some of the same traits came up though of course there were important differences The equivalent canine top ten descriptors are friendly playful
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