Your Messy Desk Isn't Proof of Anything

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Short answer: the studies behind those lists are real, but they measured something else. A messy desk was linked with more creative ideas. Swearing was linked with a bigger vocabulary under time pressure. Neither study was about IQ. The one habit that did go with lower scores is being very sure you're the smart one.

This post is for education, not a verdict on anyone. A score is one number from one test. It isn't a measure of your worth, and it can't tell you what you're capable of.

The line you've seen a hundred times

"Messy desk? That's a sign of genius, apparently."

Lists like this get passed around every week. Almost nobody checks them. So we did, for three of the most repeated habits. All three have a real study behind them. In each one, the study measured something the list left out.

What the number actually is

An intelligence score isn't a reading of your mind. It's one number, chosen because it predicts how people do across a wide range of thinking tasks.

In a study of 3,691 people across 62 different tasks, that single number explained about 45% of the differences in how people performed. That's a lot. It also leaves 55% unexplained. Every habit list you've read lives in that missing half.

The number moves, too. As these tests were recalibrated through the last century, each new generation scored higher on the old versions than the one before. That's far too fast to be inherited. Schooling and health are the likely reasons. Whatever the score reads, it isn't a fixed property of you.

Habit one: the messy desk

The study is real. Researchers at the University of Minnesota, publishing in Psychological Science, had half their volunteers work in a tidy room and half in a messy one. Everyone had to think up new uses for a ping-pong ball.

Both groups came up with about the same number of ideas. But raters who didn't know which room anyone sat in judged the messy-room ideas as more creative.

So the mess did something. It just wasn't intelligence. And the other half of that study rarely gets quoted:

In the tidy room, 82% of people gave money to charity. In the messy room, 47%.
Offered an apple or a chocolate bar, 67% in the tidy room took the apple. In the messy room, 20%.

Tidy rooms were linked with more conventional good behaviour. Messy rooms were linked with more inventive ideas. Neither one is a score.

Habit two: swearing

Two researchers asked more than 200 students to name as many words as they could in a category against the clock. Ordinary words. Animal words. And swear words.

If swearing came from a thin vocabulary, the people with the most swear words should have had the fewest of everything else. The reverse happened. More swear words went along with more words of every other kind.

So the "swearers are less clever" insult doesn't hold up. But look at what was measured: how many words you can pull out under time pressure. That's verbal fluency. The study never called it intelligence, and the lists shouldn't either.

Habit three: "I'm a words person, not a numbers person"

You may have said this about yourself. In the 62-task study, the researchers compared every pair of tasks to see how they moved together. Almost every pair moved the same way. On average, people who did better at maths also did better at vocabulary. Not worse. Better.

Real individual strengths exist, and you'll have some. But the neat split many of us describe ourselves with is one this data doesn't find.

Where the number came from

In 1905 in Paris, the psychologist Alfred Binet and a colleague got a practical job from the French government. Schooling had become compulsory, and someone needed a way to spot the children likely to struggle in an ordinary classroom, so they could get extra help.

That's what the first test was for. Finding who needed support. It wasn't built to rank minds or sort people into clever and not clever. Binet himself said what he measured wasn't fixed and wasn't one single thing. Within a couple of decades the test was being used for purposes he warned against. That's a darker story for another day.

The 100 in the middle is a decision, too. Tests are calibrated so the average of the population lands on 100. The number tells you where you sit against everyone else taking the test. Move the population and the same performance gets a different number.

Scores shift with circumstances as well. Schooling and health move them. So does motivation. Picture two people sitting the same test. One slept badly, is only there because someone made them, and stops trying around question forty. The other slept well and wants to do well. You'd get two different numbers, and neither reads the machinery. Both read a morning.

The behaviour that does say something

The part worth staying for is next. The same 62-task study asked people to guess their own score before measuring them. The guesses were barely better than chance. The people who overestimated themselves the most went on to score the lowest. And the higher someone scored on narcissism, the wider the gap between guess and result.

So if one behaviour is linked with intelligence scores, it isn't the state of your desk. It's certainty. Being sure you're the smartest one in the room pointed the wrong way in this data.

One more finding. In that study, there was no relationship at all between intelligence and happiness. Not positive. Not negative. The prize those lists dangle isn't much of a prize.

A better question

"Am I secretly a genius?" isn't a very useful question. Try this one instead: what am I actually good at, and what am I avoiding because I decided years ago that I'm not a numbers person?

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Studies behind this post

Vohs, K. D., et al. (2013). Physical order produces healthy choices, generosity, and conventionality, whereas disorder produces creativity. Psychological Science, 24(9), 1860-1867. doi:10.1177/0956797613480186
Jay, K. L., and Jay, T. B. (2015). Taboo word fluency and knowledge of slurs and general pejoratives: deconstructing the poverty-of-vocabulary myth. Language Sciences, 52, 251-259. doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2014.12.003
The 3,691-person, 62-task study on intelligence, self-estimates and happiness, as reported in Spencer Greenberg's video "We studied 3691 people to bust IQ myths".
Binet's 1905 test and the Flynn effect, as covered by TED-Ed ("The dark history of IQ tests") and SciShow Psych ("Does IQ Really Measure How Smart You Are?").

Tell us on YouTube

Which of the three have you claimed about yourself? The messy desk, the swearing, or "I'm a words person"? Tell us in the comments.

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