Here are two books by anthropologists — Sam Gosling, from the University of Texas, and Daniel Miller, from the University of London. Both are British. Both set out to explore one of anthropology’s central questions: what is the relationship between people and their possessions? At the start of his book, Gosling says, more or less, that if you look at people’s stuff in the right way, you can find out what makes them tick. Miller, on the other hand, is more tentative. He doesn’t want to generalise. But then, the people he studies seem much weirder than the people Gosling studies. Or maybe Miller is weirder than Gosling. As with all anthropological matters, it’s hard to know for sure.
Both Gosling and Miller know that the relationship between people and their stuff is a complex one. You can’t walk into somebody’s house and see a tennis racquet and know for sure that the person in question plays tennis. They might just want to give the impression they play tennis, in an effort to fool people. Or someone might have left a tennis racquet at their house. As Gosling points out, if you jump to conclusions, you might easily jump to the wrong ones. A bible in somebody’s office might be a sign of a religious person. On the other hand, some companies give a bible to every employee.
So jumping to conclusions is wrong, right? Not necessarily. Gosling once devised an experiment about jumping to conclusions. Malcolm Gladwell described it in his book Blink, which is the best book ever written on jumping to conclusions. In the experiment, Gosling asked people to answer certain questions about their friends. Then he asked some strangers to snoop around the bedrooms of the same people.
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