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messy or tidy, which is better. Historically, the evidence has favored the tidy camp. Cleanliness, as the proverb says, is next to godliness.

The anthropologist Mary Douglas noted almost 50 years ago, a connection between clean open spaces and moral righteousness. More recently, psychologists have shown that the scent of citrus cleaning products is enough to raise people's ethical standards and promote trust.

Conversely, in another study, people were found to associate disorderly wilderness with death. But if messiness is so bad, why do so many people tolerate and even embrace it? Not long ago, two of my colleagues and I speculated that messiness, like tidiness might serve a purpose.

Since tidiness has been associated with social standards. We predicted that just being around the tidiness would raise a desire for convention.

We also predicted the opposite, that being around messiness would lead people away from convention in favor of new directions. We conducted some experiments to test these intuitions.

And as we reported in last month's issue of the journal, psychological science, our guesses were right for our first study, we arranged rooms in our laboratory to look either tidy with books and papers stacked and orderly or messy with papers and books spread around.

Then we invited 188 adults to visit our laboratory individually, seemingly for a consumer choice study.

Each subject was assigned to either a messy or a tiny room where he or she was shown a menu from a deli that made fruit smoothies.

The smoothies were said to come with a boost added ingredients for which there were three options to choose a health, wellness or vitamin boost.

We created two versions of the menu half of the subject saw a menu that had the word classic, highlighting the health boost option, whereas the other half saw the health boost highlighted by the word new.

Then our subjects made their choices. And as predicted, when the subjects were in the tiny room, they chose the health boost more often, almost twice as often when it had the classic label, that is when it was associated with convention. Also as predicted, when the subjects were in the messy room.

They chose the health boost more often, more than twice as often when it was said to be new. That is when it was associated with novelty thus people greatly preferred convention in the tiny room and novelty in the messy room.

Given that divergence from the status quo is the essence of creativeness. We conducted a second experiment to test whether messiness fosters creativity 48 research subjects came individually to our laboratory, again assigned to messy or tidy rooms.

This time, we told subjects to imagine that a ping pong ball factory needed to think of new uses for ping pong balls, and to write down as many ideas as they could. We had independent judges rate the subjects answers for degree of creativity.

Answers rated low in creativity included using ping pong balls for beer pong, a party game that in fact uses ping pong balls, hence the low rating on innovation.

Answers rated high in creativity included using ping pong balls as ice cube trays and attaching them to chair legs to protect floors. 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% more creative on average. But when we analyze 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 tiny room counterparts. These results have been confirmed by independent researchers at Northwestern University who found that subjects in a messy room drew more creative pictures, and were quicker to solve a challenging puzzle than subjects in a tiny room.

Our findings have practical meanings. There is for instance, a minimalistic design trend taking hold in contemporary office spaces. were less means more private, walled in offices and even private cubicles are out of favor.

Today's office environments often involve desk sharing, and have minimal footprints, smaller office space per worker, which means less room to make a mess.

At the same time, the working world is busy with cultivating innovation and creativity and diverse that our findings suggest might be hampered by the minimalist movement. Although cleaning up certainly has its benefits.

Clean spaces might be too conventional to let inspiration flow.