This past spring, there was a widely circulated article on research by marketing professor Joan Meyers-Levy at the University of Minnesota and Rui (Juliet) Zhu at the University of British Columbia. Meyers-Levy and Zhu studied the effect of ceiling height on how people think and act. Their argument is that ceiling height influences how people process information using a priming task. They associated high ceilings (10') with the concept of "freedom" and low ceilings (8') with the concept of "confinement."
“When a person is in a space with a 10-foot ceiling, they will tend to think more freely, more abstractly,” said Meyers-Levy. “They might process more abstract connections between objects in a room, whereas a person in a room with an 8-foot ceiling will be more likely to focus on specifics.”
Press Release: U of M Researchers Find that Ceiling Height can Affect How a Person Thinks, Feels, and Acts
Science Daily - Ceiling Height Can Affect How A Person Thinks, Feels And Acts
The Influence of Ceiling Height: The Effect of Priming on the Type of Processing That People Use - Article PDF
1 comment:
Given that I have devoted +/- a year of my life to a study which attempts to correlate cognitive processes and spatial relationships OPPOSITE the findings in Meyers-Levy’s study, I have several issues with this study, and can only hope that I have the opportunity in the near future to execute and publish my research.
In the mean time, I must ask, does the science community recognize Meyer-Levy’s work as an empirical study? In my layperson opinion, it seems that the researchers take serious liberties with their logic, for example:
“We reasoned that individuals in a high versus low ceiling room, who presumably favor the use of relational versus item-specific processing, would evaluate the products as more sleek, for their relational processing should encourage sensitivity to the shared aspects of the product features, causing individuals to largely disregard the few aberrant (i.e., crude or nonsleek) ones (Meyers-Levy and Malaviya 1999). However, those in a low ceiling room, who presumably rely primarily on item-specific processing, are likely to be more sensitive to each product’s discrete and specific product features, which would include the limited number that do not imply product sleekness (i.e., crude features; Meyers-Levy and Malaviya 1999).”
I hate to see this paper referenced time and again as the breakout study of the neuroscience architecture movement when it seems to lack neuroscience methods and techniques which might triangulate the assumptions posed by the researchers.
It feels like this is the type of study which drove a division between the field of EB Research and practice 20 years ago. I would hate to see the Neuroscience-Architecture movement be dealt a similar fate before it even gets off the ground…
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