The state of your office, messy or neat, might influence your actions and say something about traits of your unique personality. A team of psychologists showed that people working at a neat and organized desk tend to be more conventional, generous, and inclined towards healthy foods. Their findings showed that messy desk, on the other hand, might stimulate creativity and a willingness to try new things. These results, based on a series of experiments announced on August 6, 2013, were recently published in the journal Psychological Science.

Kathleen Vohs, who led the study at the University of Minnesota, said in a press release^[1]:

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

View larger.^[2] | Two creative people share this office. The person on the right has been in this office for 15 years, and the person on the left for two years. Image Credit: Shireen Gonzaga.

For the experiment, participants were sent to an office to fill out a questionnaire, then given an opportunity to make a charitable donation. Before leaving the room, they were offered a choice of snacks: an apple or chocolate. Some were sent to a tidy well-organized office, others to an untidy cluttered office.

The outcome, Vohs said, was that people working in a tidy office were more likely to make larger donations and take an apple on their way out, as compared with those in the messy office.

Does anything good come out of working in a messy environment? To test this, the scientists devised two experiments. In one study, participants were asked to figure out new uses for ping pong balls. In the second one, they were asked to choose between two products, a familiar or a new item. As before, some participants were sent to tidy offices and others to untidy ones, to do these tasks.