Tidy or Messy Environment Can Impact Decisions and Behavior, Study Says

Aug. 11, 2013 — -- Here's a toast to the slob in the office, the gal with so much junk on her desk she can't find her telephone. All that clutter may be part of the reason she is so creative.

For years, we've been told that piles of personal rubbish have got to be a liability. Now there's a flip side to that theorem.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota decided to take a look at a long-established principle of human honesty and productivity -- keep your work area clean and you will be more likely to work your tail off, stay honest, be generous with your coworkers, and on and on.

Cleanliness, after all, is next to godliness.

"We were thinking about doing a paper showing how being tidy makes people kind of do the right thing," psychologist Kathleen Vohs, lead author of a study in the journal Psychological Science, said in a telephone interview. "And then we started challenging ourselves. Is there anything that goes along with a messy environment that could be good?"

So Vohs and her co-workers conducted a series of experiments in Holland and the United States to see if there's an up-side to untidiness. The finding, she said, surprised even the researchers.

A messy work environment, the research suggested, can bring out a person's creativity and lead to the birth of bold, new ideas. In other words, a less- than-perfect work environment can make a person more likely to think out of the box, or at least above the horizon of those neat people in the office.

That doesn't mean you can set a nitwit in front of a cluttered desk and end up with another Einstein, who is said to have muttered these immortal words: "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?"

Numerous historic photos of Einstein's office show he was no neat freak.

No amount of clutter is going to make an empty brain creative, but this research indicates that a little clutter may bring out the freshest and most creative side of you.

"The environment doesn't create something that isn't already there," Vohs said. "To the extent that you are creative, it pulls it out of you."

Not a lot of researchers have taken up the banner of messy desks, so there's not much to compare this work with, but the research involved a large number of participants, both young and old, and it led to these conclusions:

Those findings resulted from three experiments in which participants were assigned tasks while seated in a neat, orderly office, or in an office that was identical in every way except it was filled with clutter, such as papers on the floor and stacks of files on the desk.

Thirty-four Dutch students were tested to see if the orderliness of the room had any effect on their generosity and sense of needing to do the right thing. At the end of the experiment, for example, the students were asked to contribute to a worthy cause.