Abstract:

For a long time, people take for granted that messy environment has a negative impact on our life. However, through four experiments, we find that compared with tidy environment, messy environment has a positive influence on individuals’ performance in creativity tasks, including divergence creativity task (Study 1A) and convergence creativity task (Study 1B); messy environment also makes participants more incline to think in an heuristic way (Study 2) and promotes individuals’ cognitive flexibility (Study 3). What’s more, messy environment also increases consumers’ likelihood of buying the innovative option over the traditional one (Study 4). Finally, theoretical contributions and managerial implications are discussed.

Key words: Messy Environment, Creativity, Processing Type, Cognitive Flexibility, Novel products