Messiness and Creativity

Well, this is interesting: some researchers thought that messiness – as opposed to tidiness – might serve a purpose. And so they did some research into messiness and found out some interesting things:

When we analyzed the responses, we found that the subjects in both types of rooms came up with about the same number of ideas, which meant they put about the same effort into the task. Nonetheless, the messy room subjects were more creative, as we expected. Not only were their ideas 28 percent more creative on average, but when we analyzed the ideas that judges scored as “highly creative,” we found a remarkable boost from being in the messy room — these subjects came up with almost five times the number of highly creative responses as did their tidy-room counterparts.

Who knows? Maybe messy rooms and desks have a purpose after all . . .