Researchers from Columbia, MIT, Northwestern, Harvard and Berkeley have found that people with expansive physical settings are more likely to display dishonest behavior.
The physical settings you live in not only portray how successful you are but can tell a lot about your character too, researchers from Columbia, MIT, Northwestern, Harvard and Berkeley found in a new study.
The authors of this new study found that people who have expansive physical settings like a bigger desk at office or a larger driver's seat are more likely to display dishonest behavior than people living in moderate physical settings. This is probably because the larger space gives them a sense of more power, which in turn elicits more dishonest behavior such as stealing, cheating and even traffic violations.
"In everyday working and living environments, our body postures are incidentally expanded and contracted by our surroundings - by the seats in our cars, the furniture in and around workspaces, even the hallways in our offices - and these environments directly influence the propensity of dishonest behavior in our everyday lives," said Andy Yap, a key author of the research who spearheaded the study during his time at Columbia Business School, in a press statement.
Previous studies have established that expanded body postures give a person an added sense of power, which can sometimes lead to dishonesty. To further justify their findings and determine how power makes a person act, researchers of the study conducted four experiments. The first one was to determine when an "incidentally" expanded body led to more dishonest behavior. Another experiment examined if participants in a more expansive driver's seat would be more likely to "hit and run" when incited to go fast in a video-game driving simulation. The other two experiments were conducted in the real world and researchers looked into whether a driver's seat size predicted the violation of parking laws in New York City. They found that driver's with bigger seats were more likely to violate parking laws than drivers with smaller seats.
"This is a real concern. Our research shows that office managers should pay attention to the ergonomics of their workspaces," said Yap in a news release. "The results suggest that these physical spaces have tangible and real-world impact on our behaviors."
The findings are published in the journal Psychological Science.
