3 EXPERIMENTS THAT SHOW YOU HOW A MESSY ROOM CAN SURPRISING AFFECT PRODUCTIVITY

By Akande Aanuoluwapo

According to societal norms and standards, a messy room gives you off as a disorganized or lazy person but, apart from that, does it affect your behaviour negatively or positively and does it have any advantages at all? Below are 3 experiments to show how a messy room can affect your behaviour. 

Kathleen Vohs, PhD, ( an American psychologist and Land O'Lakes Chair in Marketing in the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota) carried out the three experiments that will be the focus of this article.

Firstly, half of the participants were put in a messy room and another half were put in a neat room. After this, the participants were asked to come up with new ideas on how to use a ping-pong. Surprisingly, the participants gave the same number of ideas but the ones in the messy room came up with more creative ways to use a ping-pong after they were confirmed by a panel of independent raters.

So, contrary to what many believe, working in a messy room can make you more creative or the messy room can be a result of your creative personality. However, personality and socialization processes may interfere too in situations like this. 

Let's go to the second experiment. In this one, Kathleen took 34 different participants and placed half in a dirty room and another room in a neat room. Afterwards, they were asked to choose a health, wellness or vitamin "boost" for a "smoothie". Some of the smoothies were labelled "new" and some other ones were labelled "classic."

Guess what the people in the messy room chose? Well, they chose the smoothies labelled "new" and the participants in the neat room chose the ones labelled "classic". This experiment signifies that if you prefer to work in a neat room, it's either an indicator that you follow conventional norms or that working in a neat room encourages you to stick to the status quo.

 However, the fact that the participants in the messy room did otherwise is an indicator that being messy is one of the fruits or catalysts of an innovative mind. It signifies a mind that doesn't follow new rules but one that sets new rules. Read the words of Albert Einstein, one of the most innovative men in history, he said: "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, then what do we think of an empty desk?" What do you think?

There are benefits of maintaining a neat room though. Vohs found out that working in a messy room would encourage you to do normally good things like eating good food or giving to the poor. So, in this third experiment, the 34 participants were first asked to fill out a questionnaire. Then, after some minutes, they were divided into a messy room and a neat room. As they were leaving the room, the two groups were asked to choose between an apple and a candy bar and they were also asked to voluntarily contribute to a charity.

 It was found that 82 percent of the participants in the neat room donated money and 67 percent of their number also took apples. However, just 47 percent of the messy room participants donated money and only 20 percent made the healthy choice of picking the apple. So, just as being messy has its advantages, it also has its disadvantages. 

So what are you to do? 

If you're always productive while working in a messy room and it doesn't cause you any harm, then go for it even though it may bring a little guilt because you're breaking a societal rule of how a room should look like. However, if you work well in a neat environment, then keep if doesn't affect your productivity or slow you down in any way.