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UT PSY 301 - Study Notes
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SnoopWhat Your Stuff Says About YouSAM GOSLINGA Member of the Perseus Books GroupNew YorkTHREEkGetting to Know YouARE YOU READING this book in a public place? If so, sneak a peekover the cover and take a look at a stranger. By definition youdon’t know much about this person. But some people do. To someonehe is a cherished father, a loving husband, a devoted friend. Whatdoes it mean to know someone? What does it take to go from being astranger 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 findhim generous too; when I was first introduced to him, he invited me tolunch to hear about my latest research projects. I soon discovered thathe’s talkative and intelligent. After a few more lunches I learned a bitabout his scholarly ambitions and how he felt about being a parent anda professor. However, as I continued to hang out with Jack, I began tonotice that the stories all seemed familiar, even though they describeddifferent events. Then one day it struck me why this was so. Whetherhe was telling me about a presentation at an academic conference, asquabble with a neighbor, or how he fixed his car last week, the narra-tive was always a variation on the same story line: Despite the oddsagainst me and the expectations by others that I would fail, I persevered andsucceeded and showed everyone else that I was right all along. The recur-ring theme resonated with the way Jack saw the world around him andhow he saw his place in that world. And this view of himself was animportant part of his personality. After figuring out his theme, I felt Iknew Jack better. I had gone to a deeper level.55Getting to know a person requires that we find ways to jump fromone level to another, not just travel extensively at the same plane. Thepsychologist who knows the most about the different levels of person-ality is one of my academic heroes, Dan McAdams. He’s a brilliant andexceptionally creative professor at Northwestern University’s Schoolof Education and Social Policy and the author of the influential bookThe Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self.I was pleased to bump into McAdams at a recent conference be-cause I had been hoping to ask him something. As soon as it seemedpolite, I hit him with my question: “Does Lynn exist?” A knowingsmile materialized on his face. Apparently he gets this question a lotbecause he immediately knew what I was talking about.PERSONALITY THE LONG WAYOne of the things I have long admired about McAdams is his refusalto shy away from the kind of deep issues that make life complicated.McAdams loves to play in the sticky stuff. His forays off the beatentrack have yielded some of the most interesting discoveries in con-temporary personality research. His goal is to understand people, inall their richness, from a systematic scientific perspective. He studiespersonality “the long way,” meaning that he is interested in learningnot only what people are like now but also how they became one wayrather than another and, ultimately, how their past and present playinto their future.In a much admired article, McAdams explores a question at thevery heart of what personality psychologists most care about: Whatdoes it really mean to know someone? He begins by inviting thereader 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 firstshe intimidated McAdams: “I felt I couldn’t keep up with the fast56 Snooptempo of her account, how she moved quickly from one exotic tale toanother. Add to this the fact that she is a strikingly attractive woman,about forty years old, with jet black hair, dark eyes, seemingly flawlesscomplexion, clothing both flamboyant and tasteful.” This was Lynn.As the evening wore on, McAdams and his wife found themselveswarming up to Lynn as she revealed more about her life and history,her values and feelings; they realized they both wanted to know Lynnbetter. This is the point at which McAdams poses his fundamentalquestion. What would he need to know in order to know Lynn better?This is a powerful question because although we can all bring tomind people we know well and people we know superficially, whenwe are forced to articulate what exactly distinguishes these twogroups of people, the veil of simplicity falls away. Beyond miscella-neous facts (he has a large collection of butterflies) and historical de-tails (she went to school in Guyana), it is hard to put your finger onwhat more you know about your inner circle of friends than aboutyour acquaintances. What is it, in concrete terms, that we know aftera thousand days of knowing someone that we did not know on day one?McAdams provides a good answer to this question. Getting toknow someone, he says, means progressing through three distinctlevels of intimacy. When he first met Lynn, he thought about her inbroad descriptors—she seemed socially dominant, extraverted, enter-taining, dramatic, moody, slightly anxious, intelligent, and introspec-tive. These descriptors are traits and they constitute the first level ofknowing a person. The Big Five dimensions—openness, conscien-tiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—describepeople at the level of traits.Traits come first in McAdams’s scheme because they provide an ef-ficient “first read” on someone. When describing ourselves and oth-ers, traits are the words we reach for first. They can often be found atthe beginning of personal ads. “Kind, vivacious, tolerant, honest, andGetting to Know You 57spunky.” “I’m fun, smart, sexy, and open.” “I’m honest, crass, a littlebit trashy, a lot naughty, and never, ever dull.”Think about the words you might use to describe someone youhave just met. There’s a good chance that your description will featuretraits heavily—terms such as curious, friendly, extraverted, anxious, andmoody arise easily in the language of personality. One study foundthat the most common words people used to describe themselves orothers were friendly, lazy, helpful, easygoing, honest, happy, moody, self-ish,and shy. Words at the bottom of the list—that is, rarely usedwords—included jittery, dramatic, reluctant, and two-faced. (Andwe’re not species-ist in our use of trait terms. In one of my studies ofdog personality, some of


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