Einstein Was Right: Clutter Is Good

[jtuck004]

...
"We were thinking about doing a paper showing how being tidy makes people kind of do the right thing," psychologist Kathleen Vohs, lead author of a study in the journal Psychological Science, said in a telephone interview. "And then we started challenging ourselves. Is there anything that goes along with a messy environment that could be good?"

So Vohs and her co-workers conducted a series of experiments in Holland and the United States to see if there's an up-side to untidiness. The finding, she said, surprised even the researchers.

A messy work environment, the research suggested, can bring out a person's creativity and lead to the birth of bold, new ideas. In other words, a less- than-perfect work environment can make a person more likely to think out of the box, or at least above the horizon of those neat people in the office.

That doesn't mean you can set a nitwit in front of a cluttered desk and end up with another Einstein, who is said to have muttered these immortal words: "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?"
...

More here.

I wonder if an employer, interested in new ideas for more income (and thus growth, and perhaps more employees) might encourage a little less orderly workplace, or if you can figure out whether you might be better served by a business whose environment is more unstructured, vs the efficiency in, say, a chain that has the same thing in the same place everywhere you go?

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Creative people tend to resist order.

The cluttered desk is a symptom, not a cause, of the creativity.

I'm surprised the researchers hadn't already known that from tons of research into creativity in the 60's & 70's

[jtuck004]

2. My wife read that and said I ought to be a veritable fountain of ideas...n/t

[tblue37]

3. As a messy, fairly creative person, I would suggest that the real reason clutter and creativity

are correlated is that creativity involves linking a multitude of things in a large number of unexpected, nonlinear ways. Neatly organized desks tend to reinforce linearity in thought and action.

I know that when I am in the depths of creative work, I am grabbing things from everywhere all at once, not one at a time, one after the other. And when I stop using those thing, when I put those things down, they go wherever the closest space is, because I am on a roll and don't have time or mental energy to spare for organizing what I am not at the moment using.

[jtuck004]

7. It's not causal, as JR said above, but creative people might be restricted in an environment which

doesn't allow them to generate those ideas, possibly because they have to worry more about being "neat" than accomplishing something?

So manipulating the environment might be a way to bring out what has been hidden...

[Jackpine Radical]

9. Your description of creativity is pretty much on the money.

One of the classic measures of verbal creativity is the Remote Associates Test.

It would give you 3 terms & you were supposed to come up with a fourth, e.g.


stool powder ball ___________

paint doll cat ___________

etc.

People who are able to access a lot of associations for each term are most likely to solve the largest number of this kind of problem, and are (by other measures) more (verbally) creative.

[mzmolly]

11. .

[bhikkhu]

5. So the think tanks should be following the hoarders film crew to find new recruits?

I'm medium-cluttered myself, always too many different projects going on, and a desk full of notes of notes and ideas for things I hope to get back to at some point...

[jtuck004]

6. Ha, that's a thought. The researchers did point out, however, that unless you already have

creativity, making a mess is nothing more than making a mess.

[MurrayDelph]

8. 30+ years ago, I had a disagreement with my incompetent principal

who cornered me one day with "You know, Murray, your desk is messY"

My first response was "That's nothing; you should see the one at home."

His second tact was to say "You know, black kids don't like seeing a lot of clutter in their lives" (He was always pulling this type of crap: Black kids can't do ...<fill-in-the-blank>, Black folks don't like ...<fill-in-the-blank&gt .

I reminded him I'm not black.

His final attempt was "You know what they say: a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind."

I looked him in the eye, and before walking away said "Then what does an empty desk show?"

[Egnever]

10. Cool now I can go tell the wife

It is all because of my beautiful mind!