Even a Messy Desk has its Benefits, New Study Says
Does your work environment affect your mental and behavioural skills? According to new research, working at a clean desk may promote healthy eating, generosity, and conventionality. But don’t underestimate what a messy desk could do. Researchers found it may actually enhance creativity and stimulate new ideas.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota compared the behaviour and work outcomes of people in a clean and tidy office environment with that in a messy space. In the first experiments, participants were asked to fill out questionnaires in either a clean or an unkempt desk. Later, they were presented the opportunity to donate to a charity, and were allowed to take a snack of either an apple or chocolate bar.
The researchers observed that participants in the clean room were more likely to do what was expected of them. They donated more of their own money to the charity and picked the healthier snack over the less healthy one than the participants in the messy room.
Unkempt environment fosters creativity and new ideas
In the next experiments, participants were asked to come up with new uses for ping pong balls. Overall, the participants in both the clean and messy room generated the same number of new ideas. But when it comes to the quality of their ideas, participants who brainstormed in the unclean space produced more creative outcomes, based on the assessment by impartial judges.
When given a choice between a new product and an established one, those in the messy room were more likely to prefer the novel one, which indicates that a disorderly environment stimulates the release from conventionality.
"Being in a messy room led to something that firms, industries, and societies want more of: Creativity," said lead author Kathleen Vohs.
Specific physical location doesn’t matter
Vohs and her team used 6 different locations in their study. According to their analysis, the specifications of the rooms were not important. Just making the environment tidy or unkempt produced significant differences in the participants’ behaviour.
"We are all exposed to various kinds of settings, such as in our office space, our homes, our cars, even on the Internet. Whether you have control over the tidiness of the environment or not, you are exposed to it and our research shows it can affect you." Vohs notes.
Currently, the researchers are studying whether their findings would apply to a virtual environment, or the internet. Preliminary results show that the tidiness of a webpage predicts the same kind of behaviours.
Their study was published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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