Everyday Research Methods

Can a messy desk make you creative?

Replication update: There has been at least one replication attempt for one of the studies in this series. The study did not replicate in this 2019 attempt.

You can read about it here (Manzi, A., Durmysheva, Y., Pinegar, S. K., Rogers, A., & Ramos, J. (2019). Workspace disorder does not influence creativity and executive functions. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2662. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02662)

 

According to a new study covered by NYT blogger Gretchen Reynolds, sitting in a messy office might make people more creative. Reynolds summarized a study by Kathleen Vohs and her colleagues at the University of Minnesota. In the study:

...college students were placed in a messy or a neat office [for ten minutes] and asked to dream up new uses for Ping-Pong balls. Those in messy spaces generated ideas that were significantly more creative, according to two independent judges, than those plugging away in offices where stacks of papers and other objects were neatly aligned.

a) Assuming that Vohs and colleagues randomly assigned people to sit in a messy or a neat office, can this study support the causal claim that "sitting in a messy office makes people think of more creative uses for Ping Pong balls?"  Apply the three causal rules to this situation.

b) A friend argues, "Maybe all the creative people were just sitting in the messy room. That's why they came up with more creative solutions." What can you say in response?

c) Note that in this study, they had two judges evaluate the creativity of the uses for Ping Pong balls that each person came up with. What questions might you ask about the construct validity of this operationalization of creativity? 

Suggested answers

a) This study was an experiment, so it can potentially support this causal claim. There is covariance, because being in a messy office goes with more creativity. There was temporal precedence, because people sat in the messy (or neat) office before they came up with creative solutions (or not). And there was internal validity--random assignment evens out any individual differences between the two groups.  As long as there were no design conf0unds (for example, both groups sat in their respective rooms for the same amount of time, were exposed to the same experimenters, and received the same creativity instructions), there is good internal validity here too.

b) Your friend's suggestion won't apply here; since they used random assignment to conditions, the most creative people in the sample were probably evenly split between the two room conditions.

c) When coders rate some behavior (such as the creativity of an answer), it's important that the coders have inter-rater reliability. In the original article published online last month in Psychological Science, the authors report the IRR as 0.81, which is acceptable.  You might also want to know more about which solutions the raters thought were creative. That is, their ratings were reliable, but were they valid judgments of creativity?

 

 

"Using Facebook Seems to Make People More Miserable"

From the Economist:  "Get a Life. Facebook is bad for you"

In this story, the Economist covers a research program by Kross and Verduyn. Past research has linked Facebook use to negative emotions, as they explain:

Past investigations have found that using Facebook is associated with jealousy, social tension, isolation and depression. But these studies have all been “cross-sectional”—in other words, snapshots in time.

(Sound familiar? Simple bivariate correlations can rarely help us establish causation). The researchers apparently recruited a sample of about 80 college students who...

...agreed to have their Facebook activity observed for two weeks and to report, five times a day, on their state of mind and their direct social contacts (phone calls and meetings in person with other people). These reports were prompted by text messages, sent between 10am and midnight, asking them to complete a short questionnaire.

 a) This is a longitudinal study. What makes this a longitudinal study? What are the benefits of a longitudinal study?

b) Here's a quote about the results of the study. Do you think these results can support the causal claim that "Using Facebook makes people more miserable?" Apply the three causal rules to this study's results, which found...

...that the more a volunteer used Facebook in the period between two questionnaires, the worse he reported feeling the next time he filled in a questionnaire.

c) Here's another result they describe. Can you draw sketch of this result (following Figure 8.3 as a model)?

... there was a positive association between the amount of direct social contact a volunteer had and how positive he felt. In other words, the more volunteers socialised in the real world, the more positive they reported feeling the next time they filled in the questionnaire.

d) What's the best way to establish the causal claim that "Facebook use makes people more miserable"?

Suggested Answers:

a) This is a longitudinal study, a type of multivariate study. They measured Facebook use at multiple points in time, and they measured people's emotions at several points in time. By studying the variables over time, the researchers are able to establish temporal precedence. The researchers analyze the data by correlating Facebook use at Time 1 with wellbeing at Time 2, and comparing that to the correlation between wellbeing at Time 1 with Facebook use at Time 2. If one of the correlations is stronger than the other, the researchers can infer which variable influenced the other one, over time.

b) There is clearly a relationship between Facebook use and negative emotions, so covariance is met. We know that Facebook use came first in time (since this was a longitudinal study), so the temporal precedence rule was met. What about internal validity? Are there third variables that could explain this pattern? For example, perhaps women use Facebook more, and are more miserable in general? Reading on, the article reports that the authors investigated some third variables, because they write,

A volunteer’s sex had no influence on these findings; nor did the size of his (or her) social network, his stated motivation for using Facebook, his level of loneliness or depression or his self-esteem.

Therefore, the researchers did consider several important third variables. Are there other third variables that might explain the pattern?

c) You could sketch this result following Figure 8.3. You'd sketch four variable boxes, representing Social contact at Time 1 and Social contact at Time 2, and positive emotions at Time 1 and positive emotions at Time 2. The cross-lag arrow between social contact at Time 1 and positive emotions at Time 2 should show a strong correlation.

d) The best way to establish causation here would be to do an experiment:  randomly assign people to use Facebook a lot, or not, and then measure their wellbeing at a later time period.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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