Category: Personality

How tidy or messy desks reflect on your personality.

A tidy desk and office makes people think you have stable emotions, an agreeable personality and a conscientious nature, new research finds.

A cluttered desk, though, is linked to being neurotic, disagreeable and disorganised.

Essentially, people make a direct link from an untidy office to negative personality traits.

All is not lost, though, for messy people.

Messy desks have been linked to breaking rules and higher creativity in previous research.

The latest conclusions come from a study in which 160 people sat in three offices of varying levels of tidiness.

They were then asked to make judgements about the occupant’s personality.

Professor Terrence Horgan, who led the study, explained the results:

“When there are cues related to less cleanliness, order, organization and more clutter in an owner’s primary territory, perceivers’ ascribe lower conscientiousness to the owner, whether that owner is a worker in the real world (office), a job-seeker (apartment), a student (bedroom) or a researcher at a university (lab office).”

Ms Sarah Dyszlewski, study co-author, said:

“Once trait information about a target becomes activated in perceivers’ minds, either consciously or unconsciously, that information can subsequently affect how they process information about, the types of questions they ask of, and how they behave toward the target, possibly bringing out the very trait information that they expected to see from the target in the first place.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Horgan et al., 2019).

Many of the stereotypes about rich people’s personalities are true, research finds.

Rich people are more extraverted, conscientious, emotionally stable and narcissistic than others, new research reveals.

Confirming the stereotype, rich people are also more self-centred and less agreeable.

The results come from a study of 130 German millionaires who all had financial assets of at least one million euros (not including property).

They were compared to a large survey of the general public.

All were quizzed about their personality and wealth.

Dr Marius Leckelt, the study’s first author, said:

“Despite the influence of high net-worth people on society, evidence about their personality is scarce.

What research there has been has tended to concentrate on how social or antisocial they are.

We wanted to discover whether they differ from the wider population more generally and, if so, how.”

Along with their findings about the personalities of millionaires, the researchers also asked a group of people how they viewed the rich.

The results showed that people overestimated how different the rich were to themselves.

However, they did identify broadly the same trends of greater conscientiousness, emotional stability and self-centredness.

Many of the wealthy Germans in the study had their own businesses, the study’s authors write:

“…more than 60% of our millionaire sample indicated that one of their main sources of wealth came from running their own company, suggesting that entrepreneurial behaviour may play an especially important role for these high‐net‐worth individuals.”

This may well stem from the ‘entrepreneurial personality’, which is something rich people shared:

“The ‘entrepreneurial personality profile’ has been described by a combination of high Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Openness as well as lower Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

This constellation is thought to address typical affordances of being an entrepreneur such as acquiring new customers, managing finances, developing innovative products, negotiating with suppliers, and coping with enduring phases of uncertainty and risk.”

The study was published in the British Journal of Psychology (Leckelt et al., 2018).