Psychology of Desk Entropy: A Review of Vohs, Redden & Rahinel (2013)

For  those unfamiliar with the term, desk entropy, as defined by Jorge Cham, is the a measure of the degree of disorder of a work space, and that frustrating inability not to be able to find things when you need  them.

Reproduced with permission: “Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham 

My desk started tidy at the beginning of the semester. Honest, Mum. It now looks like this:

I was reflecting on this earlier this week, after someone tweeted about this paper:

Vohs, K., Redden, J., & Rahinel, R. (2013) Physical order produces healthy choices, generosity, and conventionality, whereas disorder produces creativity. Psychological Science, 24, (9), 1860-1870.

What does my desk say about me? These researchers did three studies to look at the effects of tidiness. Study 1 showed that participants in a tidy room chose healthier snacks and donated more money to charity.Study 2 showed that participants in an untidy room were more creative. Study 3 showed that those in a tidy room preferred a “classic” option, but those in an untidy room preferred a “new” option.

The news here is that untidiness isn’t all bad. In these studies, although tidiness was associated with healthier choices, being in an untidy room enhanced creative thinking. I’d say that my desk is decidedly cluttered at the moment. There’s a hairbrush and scissors out of place, and wonder-duck is just sitting around, having recently taken part in an MSc lecture. My papers couldn’t be classed as “filed” in that in-tray. So – should it stay like that to enhance my creativity? That would be good for my research…

Participants in Study 2 of this paper were introduced to a messy or tidy table, and asked to come up with up to ten alternative uses for ping-pong balls. The creativity of the ideas was rated by independent coders with a good kappa score (i.e., good inter-rater reliability), on a scale from 0-3. By this method, average and overall creativity were higher when the room was untidy, and the number of ‘3’ rated ideas was also higher. Yet the number of ideas generated across conditions was similar: it was the creativity  of the ideas that varied. 

And that’s what I want. I have limited time and resources, so a few highly creative research ideas are more valuable to me than hundreds of mundane ones. Research evidence shows that other factors, not taken account of here, are important, however. Foss et al. (2013) found that gender and social support for ideas generated creativity, with women’s ideas less likely to be taken on board than men’s. Lukersmith et al. (2013) found that it was time for thinking, and incentives that were good indicators of creativity. These papers had a wider variety of measures of creativity, which were related to real-life work problems. The measures also had greater scale variability, than 0-3 as used by Vohs et al. (2013). But they didn’t measure untidiness of the work environment. This could have trumped the factors that were measured….

So what about untidiness? Other research on untidiness shows that it is problematic for normally contentious people, but not for un-conscientious individuals (Mateo et al., 2013) in terms of task accuracy. So personality types have a bearing on the effects of untidiness. Ramos and Torgler (2012) found that academics and postgrads were more likely to litter in a messy environment than a tidy one. So untidiness affects social-norm violation, in the form of littering. It is possible then, that effects of tidiness generalize beyond the students tested by Vohs et al. But what of norms? What are the processes that link untidiness to creativity? I’d want to know more about those before I resorted to not tidying up.

Research suggests that untidy environments, in the form of documents everywhere, might help academic research via accessibility of information. In a paper on open-office spaces, Lansdale et al. (2011) report that their research shows that the cluttered environment of a research office can aid memory retrieval, and that the accessibility of possibly-useful-at-some-point information in a messy space (over a ‘hot desk’ that has to be cleared at the end of the day) may help to generate new research ideas. So untidiness might just be helpful in my particular creative domain….

To bring this together then,I probably should tidy up. While there was a strong effect found on creativity in a messy environment by Vohs et al., other factors need to be controlled for, before I can conclude that untidiness is a good thing for my research (especially if I count myself as conscientious, for example). Further to this, I would need to measure creativity in more depth (and in a relevant way to the creativity I need) and would want to look more closely at what should be untidy (and how untidy)  to prompt creativity (my desktop on my PC has a beautiful filing structure). Is untidiness just about the physical environment….

I did love the end to this paper. As Einstein noted ‘If a cluttered desk, is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk, a sign?’…..there is hope for me and my desk-space yet…

Why University?

Over the past few weeks, I have been busy preparing teaching materials for the upcoming semester. I’ve been thinking carefully about the things that will engage students, and that will develop and consolidate their understanding of Psychology. Yesterday I spent a day on a teaching course, led by @georgeroberts and @ncurrant, among others. The course was outlined, and we discussed, in groups, aspects of student learning, in theory and in practice.

The session took place on Brookes’ Headington Hill campus, against the backdrop of this year’s Freshers’ Fair (where student societies and local companies try to drum up as much student support as possible via freebies). Even at 9.30 in the morning, before it was officially due to begin, the event was buzzing, and the university was alive with students.

Photo’ taken from https://www.facebook.com/BrookesUnion – check the page out 🙂

This got me thinking. Something very strange happens when I go into sixth forms to give the ‘what’s university like?’ talk. I ask school-leavers why they want to go to university. They give me all kinds of answer, from independent living, to friends for life, to getting a better job at the end. Last on the list is studying in a given discipline. Once it wasn’t mentioned until I brought it up.

The UK-based National Student Survey has 22 mandatory questions on students’ experiences of their course. Universities can choose to add questions about welfare facilities, and careers, and social events, and to the extent that these questions are asked, the results aren’t made public. Yet these are the things that seem to matter most to students, and to prospective students. So I’m left wondering why the national student survey doesn’t reflect this: why it is course-focused.

I’m a Teaching Fellow. My role is to make the students’ experience of their course as positive and fulfilling as possible – and I put a lot of effort into the nuances of this. Yet I find that students’ engagement with their learning is never as enthusiastic as their engagement with the freshers’ fair. Does it have to be? Maybe not. Maybe what I see is actually only true for school leavers. But it seems that the course they choose to study is only a small part of what a lot of students are looking for, and engaging with, in a university.

A Happy Marriage: BPS CogDev 2013 Review

This year saw a first for the BPS Cognitive and Developmental Sections, from 4-6 September, 2013, as the two joined together for their annual conferences, at the University of Reading. With more delegates in attendance than either conference is used to, the organizing committee at Reading put together a tightly-packed, yet well-thought-out, programme, under the theme of “the relationship between cognition and development”.

Lying at the very heart of this relationship, one might argue, is the study of language, reading and writing, and how our understanding of these changes as we get older. And this conference presented a veritable feast of talks and posters for researchers in this area.

I was interested to note that collaboration was a meta-theme throughout the conference, with a keynote by Mike Tomasello (Max Planck Institute, Leipzig) on early collaboration in humans and chimps, and several polished posters, looking at music and prosociality (Ria Davies, University of West London), Machiavellianism and peer relations (Loren Abell, University of Central Lancashire) and group decision making in adolescence (Alenka Gril, Educational Research Institute, Slovenia).Further to this, were informative talks on empathy and spontaneous helping (Robert Hepach, Max Planck Institute, Leipzig), reputation management (Eilidh Cage, Institute of Education, University of London) and on children’s perspective taking and emotional control.

For me the two highlights of the conference, academically speaking, were a symposium chaired by Patrick Leman (Royal Holloway, University of London) on children’s intergroup attitudes. I was pleased that a number of people attended my talk and shared thoughtful insights into the role of defenders both then, and over the English-themed conference dinner and later a ceilidh led by local band, the Diatonics.

The tightly-packed nature of the scheduling was off-set by the conference hash tag #cogdev2013,  used hundreds of times to  share photos of the events and key messages from talks. Using Twitter also means that we can click the link below to re-live the experience, which, thanks to the dedicated work of the conference team, can be described as a decidedly happy marriage.

Tweets about “#cogdev2013”

Bullying and Belonging: CogDev2013 Oral Presentation

The presentation I gave at CogDev 2013 on 5th September, 2013 may be downloaded from the link below.

Please do feel free to contact me with any questions or comments: I’d love to hear from you.