Messy or Tidy Office Environment? Doesn't Matter: Both Offer Benefits

Whether you prefer working in a clean or messy environment, a new study shows that both have their benefits.

According to researchers from the University of Minnesota, working at a clean desk may help promote the benefits of healthy eating, generosity and even conventionality. Yet working at a messy desk could possibly help foster creative, thinking and stimulate new ideas.

"Prior work has found that a clean setting leads people to do good things: Not engage in crime, not litter, and show more generosity," said scientist Kathleen Vohs, via a press release. "We found, however, that you can get really valuable outcomes from being in a messy setting."

For the beginning of the study, researchers asked participants to fill out questionnaires in an office based on how clean or messy their environment was.

Following, participants were given the opportunity to donate to a charity and even allowed to take a snack of chocolate or apple on their way out of the office.

In another part of the experiment, participants were asked to come up with new ideas on how to use ping pong balls, which led to some interesting projects, according to the researchers, especially among the more messy individuals.

Researchers found in particular that those who generated the same number of ideas as their new uses as their clean-room counterparts tended to have ideas that were also rated as more interesting and creative when evaluated by impartial judges.

As researchers continue to investigate the effects of the environment on creativity and lifestyle, they're curious to see how these effects might transfer to a virtual environment.

However, this is just preliminary data, and more experiments need to be taken through further study.

"We are all exposed to various kinds of settings, such as in our office space, our homes, our cars, even on the Internet," Vohs notes, via the release. "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."

More information regarding the study can be found in the Psychological Science.