Show me your home and I tell you who you are... (Home as A Symbol of Identity - Part 1)

Home interiors - but similarly office furniture and design - tell a lot about our taste, lifestyle, interest and values. Believe it or not, seeing snapshots of your home, even those not knowing you will find out quite precisely what sort of a person you are, how many friends you have and similar characteristics. Interesting, isn't it?

During my PhD years I was obsessed with the idea that we have a mysterious and rather neglected layer in our nonverbal communication that uses our possessions as symbols to talk about our identity.

What would you take with you to an uninhabited island?

A painting, a book, a photo album, the antique armchair of our beloved Granny, the bright red Ferrari parked in front of the house, our son's first pair of shoes, a valuable sport trophy, etc. Each of us can make a list of our most treasured objects. Of these, some are only meaningful to ourselves, remaining hidden in a drawer or on a shelf, while other objects we place overtly in front of others, in the hope that they will carry relatively clear messages about our real or desired identity and values.

Advertisements use this layer quite often when they want to make us believe that by buying a can of soft drinks or a mobile phone, we also purchase a lifestyle. Status symbols also belong to this type of communication: you have probably seen young doctors having their stethoscopes around their neck meaning that their "doctor" identity needs reinforcement (you rarely see the same with old professors…).

The "commercial" side of this topic didn't excite me, but I was always keen on interior decoration and design, so I started to be curious about the "language of possessions" and especially the symbology of homes.

Our home is much more than a shelter where we find safety and relief after the daily hassle. Our closest environment reflects our self (identity), our personal history and our achievements. Moreover messages about our social and financial status, interests, religious and political beliefs, and lifestyle can be easily decoded even by outsiders. Our home therefore carries the quintessence of who we are.

How did it all start...

Many years ago I have seen a contemporary theatre play, "Art" by the French playwright, Yasmina Reza that was a really memorable experience for me. It starts with Serge - a well-situated dermatologist - hurrying home with his latest purchase: an expensive work of abstract art, a large painting consisting of white shapes on a white canvas that he had bought for 200,000 franks. He mounts the painting on the main wall of his stylish living room and proudly awaits his friends to show it off. Soon his old schoolfriends arrive, but they do not share Serge's enthusiasm. They have completely different opinions about what constitutes "art", and this dispute shakes their long-running relationship, too.

The play is really great, it is almost impossible to summarise it here. It seems quite bizarre that Serge chooses a plain white canvas to symbolise his status and values. At one level, the debate over the painting in Art revolves around a question of aesthetic values, weighing the significance of modern abstract art in comparison to more traditional representational art. At another level, the purchase of the painting by Serge comes to symbolize a deeper rift in his friendship with Marc, a piece of concrete evidence that the two of them have grown apart.

The reason the play is still echoing in my memory is that it puts forward a lot of important questions (besides the obvious one on what is art and what is not):

• Who we are? We are what we think about ourselves or we are what our friends think about us?
• How sincere we are in our close relationships? How much truth our friendships and close relationships can stand? Or is hypocrysy better sometimes?
• What is the real foundation of a friendship?

This play gave me the motivation to carry out a research on identity symbolism. Yeah, it sounds weird, but it really tackles the first question above: who we are and how can we show others who we are?

Home as A Symbol of Identity

Do you like large open spaces in your home or rather a more intimate organization? Do you prefer vivid colours or neutrals? Do you follow modern trends or stay with practicality?

Home owners express a variety of personal attributes through their general living environment, and this identity symbolism is recognized by others with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

Others can tell it about you...

My favourite experiment in this topic is done by Sadalla et al. (1987), who photographed the living rooms and the front exterior of 12 houses of upper-middle-class owners and asked these owners to rate themselves on a range of personality traits as measures of their identity. Subsequently students looked at the photos and rated the house owners on the same attributes. After comparing the home owners' ratings with those of the observers, they concluded that home as a whole more accurately reflected the male's identity (!). It was interesting for me, because usually women play a larger role in decorating and organizing home interiors. Do we organize the home for our beloved men? It was an interesting question I wanted to find out…

Territories within the home

Another question that came to my mind was about the different parts of the home. Are they uniform from a communication point-of-view or there are places that send stronger signals? I strongly suspected the latter.

I believe that the different territories within the home are not uniform from an identity-communication aspect, as we let different people visit these. Even the most crowded living environment consists of the overlapping, but still separate and personalised territories of the people living there. The living room, the anteroom and the bathroom are public, common places, as these are the parts of the house we let others see most frequently. The most private territory is usually the bedroom and/or the study. The kitchen is used by everyone, but usually considered as the mother's territory.

The question of favourite places within the home environment is also an exciting one. Csíkszentmihályi and Rochberg-Halton (1981) wrote that everyone has an "inner sanctum" within his or her home, where they feel most at home. This is the place where we keep our most cherished objects, where we can be most ourselves. It is our favourite place within the house (which does not necessarily mean that this is the place where we spend the most time). This place is not necessarily a room. It can be a part of a room, a small snug, an armchair, etc. This is the place that tells the most about you.

What exactly your home communicates and how? These are the questions I intend to answer in my next post. Stay tuned for more interesting details!

References

• Csíkszentmihályi M. and Rochberg-Halton, E. (1981). The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
• Dittmar, H. (1992). The Social Psychology of Material Possessions. To Have is To Be. Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Whetsheaf
• Sadalla, E. K., Vershure, B., and Burroughs, J. (1987). Identity symbolism in housing. Environment & Behavior. 19, 5, 569-587.

Sources of pictures

1 - my drawing on a T-shirt made for the research presentation
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