The psychological case for decluttering your home

As a house evolves into a home it becomes a place of refuge and ultimately an extension of the self. Each room is a witness to your life: the arguments, the passions and the change. Your photos on the walls, your stuff on the shelves, these are more than mere objects, they tell the story of places you've been and people you've known. All of this helps create what psychologists call a sense of "psychological home". But it can go too far. There's a saturation point beyond which your possessions turn into clutter, clogging your space and undermining your wellbeing. A new study "The dark side of home" in The Journal of Environmental Psychology investigates these processes in a group of 1394 people (average age 54, mostly women in the US) who had previously sought advice from The Institute For Challenging Disorganization.

The results showed that attachment to one's home (measured by agreement with statements like "I identify strongly with this place") and identifying with one's possessions ("I consider my favorite possessions to be a part of myself") were both linked to a greater sense of psychological home ("I get a sense of security from having a place of my own"), and in turn this was associated with more psychological well-being. But, at the same time, a sense of home and wellbeing were undermined by excessive clutter, as measured by agreement with statements like: "I have to move things in order to accomplish tasks in my home" and "I feel overwhelmed by the clutter in my home".

The researchers based in New Mexico and Chicago said their study is "the first to investigate the dark side of home arising from negative impacts of clutter." They warned: "Clutter is often an insidious and seemingly harmless outgrowth of people's natural desire to appropriate their personal spaces with possessions that reflect self-identity and remind them of important people, places, and experiences in their lives. However, when clutter becomes excessive, it can threaten to physically and psychologically entrap a person in dysfunctional home environments which contribute to personal distress and feelings of displacement and alienation."

--The dark side of home: Assessing possession ‘clutter’ on subjective well-being

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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Why it's important that employers let staff personalise their workspaces

The sparring mitt, yellow stitches spelling "SLUGGER" casually lying on the desk. The Mathlete trophy on a high shelf. A Ganesha statue, slightly chipped. Why do people bring these kinds of personal objects into the workplace?

Researchers Kris Byron and Gregory Laurence found answers by consulting 28 people in a range of jobs and workplaces. They used the "grounded theory" approach, starting with a clutch of more open-ended interviews and then pursuing the lines of inquiry that emerged, in every case inventorying the person’s workspace and exploring the significance of each object.

The conventional understanding is that personal objects are territorial markers used to communicate who we are to co-workers. And indeed many interviewees emphasised this function, a "unique fingerprint" that expresses difference. This might be an indicator of character –  I’m a happy-go-lucky person – but participants also used objects to emphasise their organisational roles. A framed MBA certificate reminds others that this cubicle bunny is made of management material, thank you, whereas doodles show that the person is part of the creative class. An event planner explained that the thank-you notes pinned to their board were to reassure others of her reliability – a core requirement in her role.

As well as showing differences, personalisation can also affirm shared identity. Star Wars memorabilia across multiple desks shows that "a lot of us have, you know, that techie background". Similarly, some items were inside jokes, with meaning only apparent to those sharing in its history. And although personalisation could emphasise status – think of that MBA certificate – some managers attempted to de-emphasise status differences by presenting everyday objects that made themselves more approachable.

Interviewees raised another reason for personalisation: to build relationships. These items were seen as icebreakers or ways to find "common ground", whether through the contents of a bookshelf, or a photo denoting parenthood. Byron and Laurence photographed every desk-setup from the perspective of an outside visitor, and found that 75 per cent of such conversation-starters were positioned to be clearly visible from that view. Many participants felt that these personalisation functions were vital and companies prevent them at their peril: "They want to have such strong relationships with customers but they’re taking away the personal elements that I think can lend towards building those types of relationships with clients."

In contrast, a certain proportion of personalisation objects – about a third in all – were positioned to only be visible to the owner themselves. These exemplify a final function of personalisation – not to communicate to others, but to remind ourselves of our identity.

This could be an aspirational symbol – the poster put up by a designer that showed "the kind of design I eventually want to do", or the gift from an inspiring role model. Or it might be a way to put work into a larger context, so on the tough days, "you can look at your picture [of children] and realize this is only a job."

Many objects had multiple functions – communicating difference, starting conversations, and reminding oneself of identity. Byron and Laurence conclude that "organizations would be unwise to put excessive limits on employees’ personalization of their workspaces," as an innocuous paperweight may turn out to carry a lot inside.

_________________________________

Byron, K., & Laurence, G. (2015). Diplomas, Photos, and Tchotchkes as Symbolic Self-Representations: Understanding Employees' Individual Use of Symbols Academy of Management Journal, 58 (1), 298-323 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2012.0932

--further reading--
The supposed benefits of open-plan offices do not outweigh the costs

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

What recycled sewage water reveals about human psychology

The technology now exists to recycle sewage water safely, but would you drink it?

By guest blogger Sam McNerney

Each year around one million people die from water-related diseases. In most cases, the causes are painfully obvious. Without access to a modern sewage system, people dump their bodily waste into the nearest river or street, which funnels their filthy excrement and urine back into the water supply. It’s a catastrophic problem without a cheap solution.

Until now. A few years ago Bill Gates teamed up with an engineer named Peter Janicki to create an ingenious machine that uses the same ingredient that taints water supplies—human waste—to clean them. The “Janicki Omniprocessor”, which looks something like a miniature power plant, can turn waste from 100,000 people into 86,000 liters of clean water a day while generating enough electricity to power itself. “The water tasted as good as any I’ve had out of a bottle,” Gates wrote on his blog.

The Janicki Omniprocessor is a major technological breakthrough, but a psychological barrier remains. We know recycled water is clean, we trust the science, and it’s exciting to think about how many lives it will save. And yet, that nasty “Yuk!” feeling persists.

Part of our deeply rooted aversion for tainted water has clear evolutionary origins. Like many animals, we instinctually avoid food and liquid that has touched nasty substances for health reasons. Think of this instinct as Paleolithic germ theory. It wasn’t exactly modern epidemiology, but for the most part, it worked.

Unfortunately, our instincts occasionally play tricks on our judgment. In a somewhat grotesque but captivating area of study, researchers have shown that people refuse to drink orange juice from unused urine collection bottles, eat soup served in a brand-new bedpan, or touch delicious fudge baked in the shape of dog feces. It’s as if there’s some sort of immaterial essence that tarnishes these perfectly edible items.

This brings me to a new survey of over 2,600 Americans conducted by disgust guru Paul Rozin and his colleagues. Participants first read a short passage explaining how recycled water is certified safe and indicated their willingness to drink it. Next, they scored how comfortable they were drinking different types of water, from commercial bottled water, to tap water, to sewage water that had been boiled, evaporated, and condensed into pure water. Finally, they rated how comfortable they felt drinking recycled water if it had spent a certain amount of time in a reservoir or aquifer before it was fed back into the water supply. The purpose of this question was to see if the contagion heuristic—“Once in contact, always in contact”—wears off over time.

Although 13 percent of the sample indicated that they would never drink recycled water, almost half said that they would, while 38 percent remained uncertain. Disgust sensitivity, as measured by a short disgust test, correlated inversely with a willingness to drink recycled water. The more easily someone is grossed out, the less likely he or she will sip water from the Janicki Omniprocessor.

The next finding revealed something important about how the human mind perceives purity. Even though sewage water that is boiled, evaporated, and condensed is purer than tap water, participants overwhelmingly preferred tap water. Furthermore, compared to tap water, participants were more willing to drink bottled water that was filtered from tap water, even though the two are equally pure. It’s like running your clothes through the wash twice—the second wash doesn’t make anything cleaner; it just makes you feel a little bit better.

The scientists also found that participants were more likely to drink recycled water the longer it remained in a reservoir or aquifer, even though feeding recycled water back into a natural system actually decreases its purity. Rozin attributes this quirk in perception to the idea of “spiritual purification.” Just like we’re more willing to wear Hitler’s sweater if it supposedly came in contact with Mother Theresa, we’re more likely to drink recycled water if it was reintroduced into “natural systems.” (Distance also mattered. The further the water travelled, the cleaner it was perceived by the subjects.)

Rozin and his team didn’t stop there. To tease out some of these initial findings, they created a second survey for about 400 undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania. This time, participants read about four contaminants—a harmless amount of sodium cyanide, a drop containing active HIV (AIDS) virus, a heat sterilised cockroach, and a convicted murderer—then imagined drinking water that had recently come in contact with each contaminant. Not surprisingly, the undergrads vehemently rejected the idea of drinking any of this water. The cyanide provoked the least discomfort, while the HIV virus provoked the most.

So far, so obvious: when deciding to drink water or not, the most important variable to consider is its perceived purity. The most intriguing part of the paper came when Rozin asked the undergrads if they would drink clean water from the same glass, if the contaminated water was poured out and the glass thoroughly sterilised. It’s worth pausing to think about how you would answer this question. Would you drink from a glass if its previous user were a convicted murderer—even if the glass was completely clean?

Rozin found that the undergrads’ behaviour depended on a few key variables. Similar to the first study, those who were more willing to drink recycled water, and who scored low on the disgust scale, were more likely to drink from a recently contaminated glass. On the other hand, the undergrads who tended to distrust standard purification techniques to clean contaminated water were more likely to refuse. “This is particularly striking,” Rozin writes, “because these same people readily consume tap or bottled spring water, which usually have the very same contamination history as the water they reject as contaminated. We can describe these individuals as responding to what we call spiritual contamination.” For these people, even the most thorough sterilisation processes cannot remove the perceived impurities.

And that’s why I find this topic so interesting. Humans pay special attention to the history of objects—where they have been, what they have touched, and who has touched them—because we subscribe to the notion that objects have an underlying reality, an essence. Normally, this piece of mental software is helpful, but sometimes it can lead us astray.  The Janicki Omniprocessor represents a major breakthrough for producing clean water and improving health in the developing world at a low cost. But before we can put it to use, we will have to overcome a bigger obstacle: ourselves.

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Paul Rozin, Brent Haddad, Carol Nemeroff, & Paul Slovic (2015). Psychological aspects of the rejection of recycled water: Contamination, purification and disgust Judgment and Decision Making

--further reading--
Yuk! Unfairness really does leave a bad taste in the mouth

Post written by Sam McNerney (@sammcnerney) for the BPS Research Digest. McNerney is a US writer with a focus on cognitive psychology, philosophy and business. He's written for Scientific American, Scientific American Mind, Fortune, Fast Company, TechCrunch and BBC Focus and maintained a blog on BigThink.com called Moments of Genius. He currently blogs at his website: sammcnerney.com.

People may be happier when their neighbourhood fits their personality

Levels of trait "openness to experience"
are higher in central London than other
areas of the city. Image from PNAS. 

It is surely easier to be happy in some neighbourhoods than others. But a new study suggests one size does not fit all. Based on data from 56,000 Londoners collected by a BBC initiative, Markus Jokela and his colleagues report that the correlations between different personality dimensions and life satisfaction vary across the capital. The researchers say this shows "finding the best place to live depends on the match between individual dispositions and neighbourhood characteristics."

Participants filled out a personality and happiness test online as part of the BBC's Big Personality Test between 2009 and 2011. The test produced scores according to the Big Five personality dimensions (extraversion, neuroticism etc) and a measure of life satisfaction. The researchers then analysed the data by postal district and they also scored the 216 districts according to various neighbourhood dimensions, such as population density and ethnic mix.

This analysis threw up an avalanche of data. Among the highlights, there was evidence of personality clustering. For example, high scorers in the trait "openness to experience" and low scorers in "conscientiousness" and "agreeableness" are found in abundance in central London, including Islington and Kings Cross. High extraversion and low neuroticism is common in South West London, for example in Richmond.

Turning to links between happiness, neighbourhood and personality, the researchers found that openness to experience is more strongly tied to greater life satisfaction in neighbourhoods with greater population density and a higher proportion of ethnic and religious minorities. High conscientiousness, by contrast, is more strongly tied to life satisfaction in neighbourhoods characterised by low employment, and by the presence of more people with low conscientiousness and low extraversion. Agreeableness, meanwhile, is tied to happiness in places with more families and more people with low openness to experience and low extraversion.

What to make of these correlations? It's intuitive that people with a tolerance for alternative lifestyles and ideas (i.e. high scorers in openness to experience) should be happier in districts characterised by a rich mix of humanity. That high scores in openness are clustered in central London also provides tentative evidence of adaptive clustering - people moving to neighbourhoods that suit them. However, this was the only evidence of such adaptation. The patterns found for high conscientiousness and agreeableness make sense in terms of people with these traits thriving in challenging circumstances.

Links between extraversion and neuroticism and happiness did not vary by neighbourhood. But these were the traits with the strongest links with happiness. This fits past research - for example, it's well established that extraverts tend to be happier than average.

This research leaves many questions unanswered - for example, because the data were taken from a single point in time, we can't know whether people's personalities influence the neighbourhoods they move to, or if their neighbourhoods shape their personalities. Likely it's both. However, the study breaks new ground in the new field of "geographical psychology", exploring interactions between personality, place and neighbourhood. Where previous results have focused on which personality traits or neighbourhood characteristics influence happiness, the new findings begin to uncover the messy reality - our happiness depends not just on where we live and the kind of person we are, but on the complex interaction of the two.

_________________________________

Jokela, M., Bleidorn, W., Lamb, M., Gosling, S., & Rentfrow, P. (2015). Geographically varying associations between personality and life satisfaction in the London metropolitan area Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1415800112

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest. 

Are prisoners calmer when their cells are painted pink?

On the back of research first published in 70s and 80s, an increasing number of jails in the Western world are painting their cells pink, in the belief that doing so has a calming effect on prisoners.

Unfortunately, this early research was poorly designed. For example, one study found that prisoners' strength, pushing against an experimenter, was reduced when they were presented with a pink vs. blue coloured card. But the experimenter could also see the card and may simply have exerted more effort in the pink condition.

Another early study reported that prisoners were calmer in pink cells versus white cells. But the prisoners in the pink cells were monitored one year, and the white cell prisoners during another year. Also, prisoners were not randomly allocated to the different colours. Both these shortcomings make it difficult to rule out other influences, besides the paint colour on the cell walls.

Now a team of psychologists led by Oliver Genschow at Ghent University has provided the first carefully controlled systematic test of the pink cell claim. They trained guards to measure the aggressive behaviour of 59 male prisoners in Switzerland, who were placed into special detention as punishment for violating prison regulations. Half these prisoners were chosen at random to be placed into cells painted entirely pink, across the floor, walls and ceiling. The other half were placed into cells of identical size, but painted white, with a grey floor. Aggression ratings were taken on arrival in the cells and after three days.

The prisoners showed reduced aggression at the end of three days, compared with at their arrival, but crucially, at no time was there a difference in aggression levels (in terms of emotions or behaviour) between prisoners in the differently coloured cells. The same null result was found when analysis was restricted to just those prisoners who started off low in aggression, or just those who started off with higher aggression.

Genschow and his team said their results question the wisdom of painting prisoners' cells pink. In fact, they speculate that doing so could even be counter-productive: "Being placed in a pink detention cell may ... attack inmates' perceived manhood and/or cause feelings of humiliation."

_________________________________

Genschow, O., Noll, T., Wänke, M., & Gersbach, R. (2014). Does Baker-Miller pink reduce aggression in prison detention cells? A critical empirical examination Psychology, Crime & Law, 1-15 DOI: 10.1080/1068316X.2014.989172

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

How sharing a toilet helps students make more friends

The built environment shapes our behaviour profoundly - piazzas and park benches promote unplanned encounters between strangers whereas car-friendly streets have the opposite effect, the efficiency of speedy travel promoting "streets as corridors" over "streets as sociable space".

What’s true at the level of cities also applies within buildings, including student residences. This has been investigated in the past, one famous example being Leon Festinger’s 1950 study that suggested students formed stronger friendships with people whose doors they routinely walked by. Festinger argued that the familiarity coming from minor encounters ripened into friendship, but this wasn’t directly measured, and it’s possible that students who already knew each other had rooms closer together.

In a new study, Matthew Easterbrook and Vivian Vignoles tested whether building layout really can have a powerful influences on student friendships. They recruited 462 students from 13 halls of residence and asked them to record how often they met by chance with other residents in their halls over the first week of term. This serendipity turned out to be very important: more chance meetings led to stronger interpersonal bonds with other residents, not just that week but also six and even ten weeks later. Moreover, more chance meetings with other residents went hand in hand with greater feelings of wellbeing later on.

The researchers next looked at what aspects of the building increased these chance encounters. You may be unsurprised that the presence of lounges and other common social areas had a significant effect. More surprising perhaps was that their impact was matched by another factor: a lack of en-suite toilets, which led students to bump into each other when responding to nature’s call. This suggests that mere encounters, regardless of their form, are a foundation for strangers to feel relaxed and connected to one another. My student halls had shared toilets, and looking back, the greetings we exchanged while clutching a roll of toilet paper made it easier to let go of any pretences and feel more relaxed around each other.

Common facilities may not always be a good; where relationships are strained, forced contact could worsen things. This student demographic are actively seeking connections with their new peers, and in this context, individuals are better off in an interdependent and even inconvenient setup, than in a self-sufficient but atomised one. What impresses itself on me is the evidence of a general rule: the more we control and plan our encounters, the less space there is for the chance interaction, as true of our accelerating cities as it is for the environments in which we work, sleep, or study.
_________________________________

Easterbrook, M., & Vignoles, V. (2014). When friendship formation goes down the toilet: Design features of shared accommodation influence interpersonal bonds and well-being British Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1111/bjso.12062

--further reading--
Is there a psychologist in the building?

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

Want people to care about the environment? Don't overplay the power of science

When people are presented with a picture of rapid scientific progress, they are less likely to engage in environmentally friendly behaviours. This is the conclusion reached across a series of experiments in which students were presented with a short newspaper article on science's achievements and future prospects.

The news article came in two flavours. Participants in the "progress" condition read a uniformly positive perspective, lauding medical advances and new technologies to combat climate change. In the "undermine progress" condition, the article emphasised how killers such as cancer remain insoluble and the limited nature of technological solutions to environmental problems. Of more than one hundred students from the University of Amsterdam, those who read the pessimistic article subsequently agreed more with the idea that "our lives are ruled by randomness".

Researchers Marijn Meijers and Bastiaan Rutjens say this attitude has consequences for how we act. We relax when the world appears well-ordered and the future predictable, whether thanks to our own efforts or because we trust others can manage things. These agents could be family, government, or God; and according to this new research, "scientific progress" can now be added to the list.

In another experiment with more participants, those who read the scientific progress article went on to report fewer pro-environmental attitudes and intentions than those in the undermining condition, agreeing with statements such as "I believe waste sorting is unnecessary".

Yet more participants were confronted with hypothetical decisions. In this case, students who read about scientific progress chose to spend less money on factory air filters, and were less likely to select organic options when shopping (although note that the comparison for this latter result only reached a marginal level of significance).

"If they're doing something, I don't have to" is a lazy rubric in most situations, but it's hard to think of a more misguided application than to the maintenance of our living environment. Science cannot fully mitigate the ongoing environmental crises, so - whether through the day-to-day habits of energy efficiency or one-off decisions to invest in a home away from a flood plain - we need to be prepared to get stuck in ourselves. To support this, science communicators should be wary of presenting science as an unstoppable force, and instead highlight the fascinating truth: it's a process of inquiry that makes no promises.

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Meijers, M., & Rutjens, B. (2014). Affirming belief in scientific progress reduces environmentally friendly behaviour European Journal of Social Psychology, 44 (5), 487-495 DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.2009

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

How can we increase altruism towards future generations?

By guest blogger Dan Jones

Like many parents, I often wonder what kind of world my two-year-old son will grow up to inhabit. Will the planet be ravaged by extreme climatic events, depleted of vital forests and biodiversity? Although some of our fears about the future may be overblown, if we don’t want to leave the planet in ruins for future generations, we need to think about how we act today — and maybe change our ways.

Some changes are likely to involve minor sacrifices or small inconveniences – recycling our waste, or walking to the supermarket. The benefits of these gestures will largely be felt in the long term, so they can be seen as a kind of altruism towards, or cooperation with, our children, their children and so on into the indefinite future.

What makes people act this way? Since Darwin’s time, biologists, economists and psychologists have been developing theories of how cooperation and altruism can evolve, and the factors that nurture these prosocial traits. One basic insight is that cooperation and altruism are much more likely to emerge when people know they will continue to interact with each other for the long term, under what Robert Axelrod calls the "shadow of the future".

But what about when this shadow falls on people who haven’t been born yet, and who won’t therefore be able to reciprocate our kindness? What promotes cooperation in these situations? This is the question that Oliver Hauser and colleagues set out to tackle in research published today.

Cooperating with the future

Studies of cooperation usually involve economic games in which people can act selfishly or cooperatively with other members of their group. In exploring the dynamics of intergenerational cooperation, however, Hauser and colleagues had to invent a new kind of economic game, one that could capture the idea of cooperating with the future.

So they came up with the online Intergenerational Goods Game. To begin with, people are put into groups of five to form the first "generation" of the game. This generation is endowed with 100 units that represent a resource that can be extracted from the environment. Each player in the first generation then independently decides how many units, up to a maximum of 20, to withdraw from the common pool of 100. Every unit a player takes adds 5 cents to their personal turn-up fee of $0.50.

Each group of five players is told that if they collectively withdraw 50 units or fewer from the common pool, then the units are replenished back up to 100, and passed on to the next generation (another group of five) and so on, who will then have the chance to play the same game. If, however, the group exceeds the 50-unit threshold, then the next generation inherits nothing. This means that if the average number of units individual players took is greater than 10, they exceed the threshold. Taking more than 10 units therefore amounts to acting selfishly with regard to the future.

In addition to these rules, players were also told that in any given generation there was a 20 per cent chance that there would not, in fact, be a following generation to worry about. The experiment, which involved US residents, began with 20 groups of five in the first generation, two of which did not have a second generation. But of the 18 that did, just four had their resources replenished; the other 14 inherited nothing because the previous generation exceeded the threshold. By the third generation, just two groups had full resources, and none at all in the fourth generation — bad news for sustainability.

Rotten apples

Hauser et al. found that this selfishness was not a group-wide phenomenon, but was driven by a minority of selfish players (38 per cent) who skewed the otherwise cooperative average of the rest of the group.

So much for when people are left to their own devices. In the next stage of the experiment, Hauser et al. introduced a key institutional innovation: democratic voting. In this version of the game, players voted for the share they felt each group member should receive, and then the median average of these (i.e., the value in the middle of the range) was calculated and multiplied by five. Using the median, rather than the mean, is important because it is more resistant to extreme choices.

In this democratic institutional setting, cooperation with the future got a big boost: the threshold was never exceeded and resources were continually replenished for a full 12 generations (the end of the game). Democratic voting enhanced future-orientated cooperation in two ways. First, using the median average cancelled out extremes of selfishness. Second, and more importantly, it gave players the confidence that playing fair was worthwhile - they knew they wouldn’t end up being the sucker in a group of selfish takers. Cooperative behaviour jumped from 62 per cent to 88 per cent under democracy.

Hauser et al. found that the cooperative benefits of democracy applied even when the threshold for replenishing resources was reduced from 50 units to 40 or 30 (thereby demanding even more self-restraint), and when the probability that there would be any future generations decreased from 80 per cent to 60 per cent. Under these conditions, the percentage of groups that were fully sustained over time did decrease a bit, but nowhere near as much as when voting was absent.

--

These results are far from being the basis for a sustainable future, or a theory of how populations can keep going. But they do highlight that how we behave, and how much regard we show to others, is not just a function of our innate psychology, or whether we’re fundamentally kind or mean people, but of the kinds of institutions that we find ourselves working within. If we want to change the world we may indeed need to change ourselves — but this should not obscure the fact that we may also need to revise, adapt or invent new institutions to bring out our altruistic, cooperative sides.

 _________________________________

Oliver P. Hauser, David G. Rand, Alexander Peysakhovich, & Martin A. Nowak (2014). Cooperating with the future Nature

Post written by Dan Jones (@MultipleDraftz) for the BPS Research Digest. Dan Jones is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK, whose writing has appeared in The Psychologist, New Scientist, Nature, Science and many other magazines. He blogs at www.philosopherinthemirror.wordpress.com.

Climate change sceptic films more influential than advocacy films, claims study

Eminent scientists have condemned films that are sceptical about climate change. After airing of the Great Global Warming Swindle in 2007, for example, Sir Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society at the time, said "those who promote fringe scientific views but ignore the weight of evidence are playing a dangerous game."

Of course there are also films that affirm the idea that human activity has contributed to the rise in global temperatures - Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is probably the most well known. Unfortunately for environmentalists and people who believe global warming is a threat, a new study claims that sceptical films have a more powerful influence on viewers' attitudes than climate change advocacy films.

Tobias Greitemeyer recruited 97 students at the University of Innsbruck. Thirty-three of them watched the climate change affirming film Children of The Flood - a futuristic tale depicting the life-threatening impact of melted ice-caps. Thirty-six watched The Great Global Warming Swindle, which challenges the idea that global warming is affected by human activity. The remainder acted as controls and watched a neutral film Forgotten Country in The Mekong Region, about life in Laos. The participants watched the first 15 minutes of each film.

Although the students were allocated randomly to the different conditions, those who watched the sceptic film subsequently reported more negative attitudes toward the environment than those who watched the neutral film or the affirming film. By contrast, there was no difference in attitudes to the environment between students who watched the neutral film and those who watched the affirming film.

A second study was similar but this time 92 students watched either Six Degrees Could Change the World (climate change affirming); The Climate Swindle: How Eco-mafia Betrays Us; or Planet Earth: Caves (a neutral film). Also, Greitemeyer added in a questionnaire about participants' concern for the future.

This time participants who watched the sceptical film ended up with greater apathy towards the environment as compared with participants who watched the neutral or affirming films, an outcome that was mediated by their having reduced concern for the future in general. This was the pattern both for participants who tended to engage in pro-environment behaviours in their everyday lives and those who didn't so much. As in the first study, there were no differences in post-viewing environment attitudes between those who'd watched the affirmative or neutral films.

When it comes to a lack of belief in the human causes of global warming, Greitemeyer said his results suggest "the media are part of the problem, but may not easily be used to be part of the solution." He thinks sceptical films have a negative influence on people's attitudes, but that films advocating for the human impact on climate change are ineffectual.

Unfortunately his claims are undermined by the limitations of the study. Above all it's unfortunate that he didn't measure his participants' baseline attitudes. This means we can't get any idea of the size of the influence of the films and we have to trust on faith that the randomisation to conditions was effective (i.e. that students in the different film conditions didn't differ in their attitudes before watching the films). There is also a question mark over how much the results would generalise to a non-student sample.

Indeed, in a subsequent survey of different students at the same uni, Greitemeyer found that they had an overwhelming bias towards believing in the reality of human effects on global warming. Therefore, perhaps the sceptical films appeared to be more influential because they contradicted students' pre-existing beliefs whereas the affirmative films told the students only what they already knew. A final limitation is the lack of analysis of the content of the films - we don't know what the active ingredients might be nor whether these were found equally in sceptical and affirmative films.

_________________________________

Tobias Greitemeyer (2013). Beware of climate change skeptic films. Journal of Environmental Psychology DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2013.06.002

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

The supposed benefits of open-plan offices do not outweigh the costs

The worlds of business, office design and psychology really need to get their heads together. Large open-plan offices have become the norm across modern cities despite a sizeable literature documenting the disadvantages, including increased distraction and diminished worker satisfaction.

Open-plan offices are favoured by companies largely because of economic factors - more employees can be housed in a smaller space. But there are also supposed communication benefits. The idea is that open spaces foster more communication between staff and boost community spirit. A new study based on a survey of over 42,000 US office workers in 303 office buildings finds no evidence to support this supposition whatever.

Jungsoo Kim and Richard de Dear analysed the workers' answers to the industry standard "Post-occupancy Evaluation" that asks them to rate their satisfaction with seven aspects of their office environment including: temperature, lighting, privacy and ease of interaction, plus it asks about their overall satisfaction with their personal workspace. Two thirds of the surveyed workers were based in open-plan offices (with or without partial partitions); a quarter had private offices; and a small fraction shared a single room with co-workers.

Overall, workers in private offices were the most satisfied with their workspace. Workers in open-plan offices expressed strong dissatisfaction with sound privacy, and this was even more so the case in open-plan offices with partitions. This is probably because visual screens make ambient noise harder to predict and feel less controllable.

The most powerful individual factor, in terms of its association with workers' overall satisfaction levels, was "amount of space". Other factors varied in their association with overall satisfaction depending on the different office layouts. Noise was more strongly associated with overall satisfaction for open-plan office workers whereas light and ease of interaction were more strongly associated with overall satisfaction for workers in private offices.

But the key finding relates to whether the costs of lost privacy were outweighed for open-plan office workers by the benefits of ease of communication. There is in fact past field research to suggest that open-plan offices can discourage communication between colleagues due to lack of privacy. Consistent with this, there was a trend in the current study for workers in private offices to be more satisfied with ease of interaction than open-plan workers. Moreover, analysis showed that scores on ease of interaction did not offset open-plan workers' dissatisfaction with noise and privacy issues in terms of their overall satisfaction with their workspace.

"Our results categorically contradict the industry-accepted wisdom that open-plan layout enhances communication between colleagues and improves occupants' overall work environmental satisfaction," the researchers concluded. They added: "... considering previous researchers' finding that satisfaction with workspace environment is closely related to perceived productivity, job satisfaction and organisational outcomes, the open-plan proponents' argument that open-plan improves morale and productivity appears to have no basis in the research literature."

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Jungsoo Kim, and Richard de Dear (2013). Workspace satisfaction: The privacy-communication trade-off in open-plan offices. Journal of Environmental Psychology DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2013.06.007

--Further reading--
From the BBC: The decline of privacy in open-plan offices.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

How room and desk size affect people's comfort discussing personal issues

A new study suggests that people feel more comfortable talking about private matters in a larger room at a larger desk. It's a result with obvious practical implications for professionals who require openness from their clients.

Vanessa Okken and her colleagues allocated their 86 participants (average age 22; 38 men) to speak to a female Masters student in one of four situations - at a small desk (80cm interpersonal distance) in a small (16 square meters) or larger room (19.8 square meters); or at a large desk (160cm interpersonal distance) in the same small or larger room.

The participants were videoed answering questions posed by the young woman about substance use, sexuality and emotions. She was unaware of the purpose of the study. The video camera was arranged in such a way that the coders who later assessed the participants' answers were unaware of the setting.

Afterwards the participants said they'd felt more at ease and less inhibited in the larger room and this appeared to be because they felt it was more spacious. Further analysis showed that room size only led to feelings of greater openness when participants were sat at a large desk. It's possible the intimacy of a small desk overpowers the liberating effect of a larger room.

Participants also behaved differently in the various physical situations. In the larger room, they leant forward more and had a more open posture. They leant on the larger desk more than they did on the small desk. In the larger room, they also made more eye contact at a large desk compared with a small desk.

For the crucial test of how much the participants revealed in their answers, the results varied according to the interview topics. Sometimes the room size made a difference, sometimes the desk. For instance, participants used more words talking about substance use in the larger room. Talking about sexuality, participants used more words, talked for longer, and referred to themselves more often at a larger desk. Regarding discussion of emotions, including loneliness, participants' answers were more intimate in a larger room and this appeared to be because they felt the room was more spacious.

Okken's team said their findings have practical implications. "The differences in effects per topic call for adopting a flexible environment (i.e. extendible desks) that can be easily altered to fit the needs of a large variation in conversations," they said. "To influence room size, room dividers may be used, when resorting to another (smaller or larger) room is not an option. Furthermore, room layout and positioning of other furniture pieces can influence the amount of space available and in turn possibly influence self-disclosing behaviour."

These are intriguing results but one problem is the lack of any assessment of the interviewer's behaviour. Although she was blind to the purpose of the study, it's possible that room and desk changes affected her interview style and that it was this that explained at least some of the results. As the researchers acknowledged, it was also disappointing that the participants' greater feelings of openness were associated with so few actual differences in disclosure - most measures such as time spent talking led to null results.

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V Okken, T van Rompay, & A Pruyn (2013). Room to move: On spatial constraints and self-disclosure during intimate conversations.  Environment and Behaviour DOI: 10.1177/0013916512444780

--Further reading--
How to make the ceiling of your room seem higher.
Why you should fill your rooms with rounded, curvy furniture.
The perfect workspace according to science.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Irrational human decision making during a zombie apocalypse

You're in a room full of lumbering zombies and you want to get out quick. Here's a tip: the stress of the situation will make you favour the exit that you're most familiar with even if that's the busiest way out. Give yourself a better chance by checking that there isn't a quieter way to escape the flesh-munchers.

This is the lesson from a study conducted by researchers at the ZombieLab event held at London's Science Museum earlier this year. Nikolai Bode and Edward Codling presented 185 participants (90 women; average age 25) with a computer simulation showing a top-down view of a corridor and a zombie-filled room with two available doorways on opposite sides.

Each participant was represented in the simulation as a black-filled circle which they controlled with a computer mouse. To start they were directed to follow arrows from their initial position in the corridor into the room. For the second phase, their task was to exit the room as fast as possible back to the corridor. During this evacuation phase, the zombies in the room were also attempting to get back out into the corridor.

In a baseline condition, the participants showed no preference for either of the exits. However, when stress levels were ratcheted up with a prominent challenge to beat the current fastest time, the participants' decision making was affected. Under stress, participants were more likely than in the baseline condition to try to exit via the route they used to enter the room, even though this was the most crowded exit favoured by the majority of the zombies.

The result fits with anecdotal observations from real life emergencies. For instance when the Lowenbrauskeller building in Munich was evacuated in 1973, two people were killed in a crush at the main exit as fleeing occupants ignored eight other signposted exits on route.

"Our approach has revealed what can only be described as nonrational human decision making under the influence of the motivational, potentially stress-inducing, treatment," said Bode and Codling. "We suggest that in evacuations with higher stress levels evacuees will be more likely to use known exit routes and less able or willing to adapt their route choices, even if this results in longer evacuation times."

An obvious weakness of the research is that it was based on a computer simulation. Bode and Codling acknowledged this and said their approach presented a mid-way between purely theoretical studies and real-life evacuation drills. Another criticism is with the believability of the horror scenario - if the zombies were rushing to exit the room, why follow them?

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Nikolai W.F. Bodea, and Edward A. Codlinga (2013). Human exit route choice in virtual crowd evacuations. Animal Behaviour DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2013.05.025

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

How to design a street that's mentally rejuvenating

More people worldwide now live in cities than in the countryside. Combined with sprawl and the loss of urban green spaces, this means that many of us are unable to enjoy the restorative effects of a natural setting. But what's to say the built environment, designed well, can't have a rejuvenating effect too? "The built environment can be more beautiful than nature," the British planning minister said recently, "and we shouldn’t obsess about the fact that the only landscapes that are beautiful are open — sometimes buildings are better."

What's clear is we need more research on the psychological effects of urban design. Sadly, planning, architecture and psychology tend not to speak to one other. A new study takes us a step in the right direction. Pall Lindal and  Terry Hartig presented hundreds of Icelandic participants with dozens of computer-designed residential, terraced streetspaces that varied in two main ways - the degree of variety and complexity in the building design, in terms of the ornateness of the roofline and facades; and building height, which varied from one to three stories.

Participants were asked to imagine that they were walking down the street, mentally exhausted after work. They then rated each streetscape in terms of its restorative potential, how much they liked it, its "fascination" (how much it offers the chance to explore and discover), and its ability to give a break from routine (what the researchers called "being away").

Examples of streets judged to have least (left), medium, and maximum (right) restorative power. 

Greater architectural variation in the street scene and lower building height both contributed to the perception that the environment was restorative - allowing the participants to "rest and recover their abilities to focus". Greater architectural variety also tended to go hand in hand with a greater sense of fascination and with "being away" (although not with preference), factors which explained the link with perceived restorative power. In contrast, higher buildings were associated with a diminished sense of "being away" and were judged less restorative.

The findings make sense in terms of increased building intricacy and variety allowing the mind to alight on the visual scene, find interest, and therefore disengage from prior mental toils and challenges. Excess building height, on the other hand, fosters a sense of too much enclosure, which clashes with our instinctual preference for a minimal level of openness - possibly an evolutionary hang-over allowing us to notice predators.

Although this study is a welcome contribution to the psychology of architecture, it suffers from numerous limitations. Among these is the fact most of the Icelandic participants reported a lack of familiarity with urban scenes of this kind - results could be different in other countries. Also, the participants didn't experience actual streets, and only perceived, rather than actual, restorative powers were measured. Finally, the levels of architectural variety were minimal - no fewer than 50 per cent of the buildings in any scene were identical. Higher levels of variation could have an adverse effect.

Notwithstanding these issues, the researchers said "their results affirm that densely built urban residential settings need not lack restorative quality, and that the design of the built environment can play a significant role in affecting perceptions regarding possibilities for restoration."

"Such information is needed in the effort to create urban environments that are sustainable in social and psychological terms," they added, "as well as in ecological terms."

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Lindal, P., and Hartig, T. (2013). Architectural variation, building height, and the restorative quality of urban residential streetscapes. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 33, 26-36 DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2012.09.003

--Further reading--

Is there a psychologist in the building?
Do urban environments trigger a mindset that's focused on the bigger picture?
Living in a city, or growing up in one, is associated with heightened brain sensitivity to social stress

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.