Does your messy office make your mind look cluttered? Office appearance and perceivers' judgments about the owner's personality

Abstract

How perceivers' impressions of a researcher's personality might vary as a function of the messiness of the researcher's office was explored in the current set of experiments. Participants from the US were randomly assigned to sit in a researcher's office (A) that was either clean, neat, organized, and uncluttered or one (office B) that was somewhat messy (experiment 1) or very messy (experiments 2 & 3). They guessed the Big 5 traits of the researcher afterward. In each experiment, participants thought that the office B researcher was less conscientious than the office A researcher. In experiments 2 and 3, participants also thought that the office B researcher was less agreeable and more neurotic than the office A researcher. Discussion centers on how the degree of office messiness might matter in terms of whether perceivers view the office owner as possessing one or more negative personality traits.