 How we arrange and organize our rooms can say a lot about us. For many of us, our bedrooms are the most personal and intimate spaces in our home. Colors and smells can give away your sensory interests and small decorations can hint at your taste and personal style. For example, a messy room can mean that you're disorganized while a very neat and clean room can suggest that you're uptight. In Malcolm Gladwell's acclaimed book, Blink, he references Samuel Gosling, a personality and social psychologist, who studies how people's behavior, appearance, and physical environment affects how they're perceived. Gosling names three variables in a bedroom that gives out clues to a person's personality. Identity claims, behavioral residue, and thoughts and feelings regulators. An identity claim is a deliberate expression about how you want to be perceived by others. For example, putting your favorite box on a shelf serves as an identity claim because the people who enter your room can instantly get a good perspective of the things you're interested in. Behavioral residue, on the contrary, is the unintentional results of your behavior. If you leave your shoes scattered around the floor, it's probably because you're lazy. You didn't intentionally leave them there to give the impression that you're unorganized. Thoughts and feelings regulators are objects that affect the way you feel in your room. Candles that you put on top of your desk to give your room a calm feeling is an example of a thought and feelings regulator. So if a stranger enters your room and takes a look around, they'll be able to gather certain aspects about your personality just by observation. Gosling proved this in an experiment involving 80 college students using a highly respected questionnaire called the Big Five Inventory which measures people across five dimensions. One, extraversion. Are you sociable and fun-loving or retiring and reserved? Two, agreeableness. Are you trusting and helpful or suspicious and uncooperative? Three, conscientiousness. Are you organized and self-difciplined or disorganized and weak-willed? Four, emotional stability. Are you worried and insecure or calm and secure? Five, openness to new experiences. Are you imaginative and independent or down to earth and conforming? He first had close friends of those 80 college students fill out the questionnaire. Then, he had another group of total strangers who had never met the 80 college students go into their dorm rooms and, along with the clipboard and 15 minutes to look around, told them to fill out a very similar questionnaire. The close friends of the college students calculated their friends' extraversion and agreeableness way more accurately than the strangers, which makes sense because you have to personally know somebody in order to make a better judgment of his or her personality. But, surprisingly, the strangers did a far better job than the students' friends at predicting conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to new experiences. This demonstrates that it is possible for people who have only known you for a short time to learn a lot about you, just and also by looking around your bedroom. Little details like having a bottle of sleeping pills on your desk, which suggests that you have trouble with falling asleep, or leaving clothes and unfinished food all around your floor, which hints that you don't have time to stay organized, can say a lot about your passions, desires, work, and psychological state of mind. Now look around your room and try to take note of any objects that can potentially reveal parts of who you are. Which objects do you think most strongly portray your personality? Comment your answers down below. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to follow our Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook for more content, and don't forget to subscribe. Thanks for watching and have a wonderful day!