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Ceiling Height May Affect Problem-Solving Skills
An anonymous reader writes to mention that a recent University of Minnesota study suggests that ceiling height may affect problem-solving skills. "'When people are in a room with a high ceiling, they activate the idea of freedom. In a low-ceilinged room, they activate more constrained, confined concepts.' Either can be good. The concept of freedom promotes information processing that encourages greater variation in the kinds of thoughts one has, said Meyers-Levy, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota. The concept of confinement promotes more detail-oriented processing."
Obviously, they're doing it wrong.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
It may affects grammar skills too.
Wealthier individuals with the larger home... does the environment itself produce children who are less restricted in their thinking?
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I can buy the idea that the ceiling tends to stifle my creativity, but I think the chain attaching me to my desk and the guy who comes around every 15 minutes with the whip probably don't help either. And if all that weren't bad enough, they haven't changed the variety of snacks in the snack machine in like 3 years. There has to be something in the Geneva Conventions about that.
I think you made a mistake in the title.
From the title "Ceiling Height May Affects Problem-Solving Skills"
Should be "Ceiling Height May Affects Grammar Skills"
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Valkyrie is about to die! Wizard needs food -- badly!
"professor of marketing"
Is marketing a Science now?
-Peter
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I wasn't aware that cognitive psychology was a branch of marketing.
That's like saying that automotive engineering is an offshoot of ricer tuning. (To coin a car analogy)
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Umm, we just read a report that ceiling height affects detail-oriented thinking. Mmmkay? So, I'm gonna have to ask you to mount this sheet of plywood across the top of your cubicle. If you could just take care of that, that'd be really great.
But the ceiling is closing in on me!!!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
...if they move my desk again I'm going to burn the building down.
The next question is - since ceiling height really is relative to how tall the person in the room is, (a 6.5 foot high ceiling would brush some people's heads and feel cramped, while others I know in the industry would not be able to reach it while standing on their desks and jumping.) does this mean that very short people are generally more prone to activating the idea of "freedom", while ludicrously tall people are more prone to thinking in constrained, confined concepts, when both are placed in an identical office environment?
This, while news to me, doesn't actually surprise me at all.
I've encountered this effect personally - working on cars, the thought and problem-solving processes I go through when lying on the driveway under the car are notably different than those when I shimmy out and stand up next to it. Case in point: the starter/solenoid assembly on a 1977 Caprice is practically a topological brain teaser if you're trying to put it in or take it out without removing significant sections of the frame. There's literally one correct ordered set of rotations and translations that must be performed to do so.
Standing next to the car with the starter, I had an incredibly hard time solving this problem. Once under the car, however, it was a matter of a few minutes before I could "see" the solution. Before everyone points out the obvious, no, it wasn't a matter of being able to literally see the solution; given the available vantage point due to the right front tire, the jack, and a frame member, you really couldn't see any more of the problem than the first opening.
That's the most specific example I've got, but a similar thing has happened to me multiple times. At this point, I spend most of my planning time under the car with rust falling in my eyes, because I think better that way.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
but it seems that everywhere, the ceiling makes you.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
You get wet when it rains.
Rhapsody in Numbers
What about outdoors versus indoors?
Ancient greek philosophers wandered around outside a lot, so the stories go. I'm curious about where lawmakers did their work, traditionally; probably inside buildings, but how high were the ceilings?
I checked the latest revision of wikipedia's page on Ancient Greek law (as of the time of posting this comment) to see if there were any pictures of ancient Greek law buildings, but, there were only references to "Ancient Greek poop" and "Roman crap." This could be symbolically indicative of legislatures in low-ceiling buildings, but I suspect it's just random vandalism...
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
--Chag
As a psychology student/researcher, I must say our worst enemy is the media. The way these stories are reported sometimes distorts the research or the conclusions drawn from it. If you were to read the actual journal article when it is published, it will likely be far less B.S. like "activating inner creativity" and more like "participants in the higher ceiling room demonstrated more creativity as measured by (variable)." Although the article may have used BS terms since its a marketing journal and not a proper psych journal. The publication standards in education, communication, and marketing journals are generally less demanding and so sometimes crap gets through and makes all scientific research outside of bio/chem/physics look bad. Also, since correlation does not imply causation it is possible that as previously mentioned certain jobs will intentionally create different environments for whatever reason...ie graphic designers may care more about an open aesthetically pleasing office than engineers who sit in cubicles and just want to do their work. In addition this article fails to give any actual statistics, which limits how much we can critique it...so if it has a correlation of .9 there is probably a good connection between ceiling height and creativity, but if its only .3 it could just be coincidental or due to many outside factors.
There is more to science than physics!
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More people discovering what Christopher Alexander discovered, and what thousands of years of humans knew before he re-discovered it.
Pattern #190: Ceiling Height Variety
http://www.ahartman.com/apl/patterns/apl190.htm
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2. "Accidentally" cut it into two separate posts
3. ???
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The Slashdot Limerick
I see that maxim quoted a lot these days. I see the point it's making, of course; but I can't help wondering: what does prove causation, then?
If a phenomenon is observed only when something is present but never when it is not, a causal relationship can reasonably be construed. The other point is, at least in science, nothing is ever proven!P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
Did they consider whether, for a fixed ceiling height, shorter people exhibited less constrained thinking?
Have gnu, will travel.
Yes..
Until you start to sky dive
No I'm not being sarcastic I'm serious.
After sky diving regularly (to the point of being licensed and in control of yourself in the air) you start to look at the sky differently. It ceases to be just something that is there, instead its a medium that is yours, you can move with it in, you feel as though you have an extra degree of freedom - its changes your perspective.
I'm told many pilots and other aerial sports people feel the same way - ditto for divers and the water.
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