"Don't throw that away! It's a creativity pizza and it belongs on the floor … "

You're a slob. But you also don't give a fuck. It just means you're more creative.

This at least according to a few researchers from Minnesota who studied behaviors relating to a person's behavior while sitting in a messy office over a tidy and clean one. 

What they found is that a clean room — with everything put away neatly on shelves and off of the floor — influences a person to act in the status quo, to do everything they think is expected of them. But a messy room? Those people go rogue and often have more creative and independent ideas.

The experiments took a handful of people and had them answer questionnaires while being in one of the two rooms. They were then given the opportunity to donate to charity and grab either an apple or piece of candy on the way out. What they found is that those in the clean room donated more to charity than those in the cluttered setting. They also grabbed the apple as opposed to candy — suggesting the clean participants were more impacted to be a square.

In other experiments, the rooms remained the same, except this time people were asked to figure out new and innovative ways to use ping-pong balls. The cluttered room participants were able to come up with the same amount of ideas than the clean room participants, but were rated as far more creative and useful than not by independent panelists. The researchers concluded that creativity gets a boost when things are tossed around like when your roommate Bradley has too many PBRs and late-night gaming sessions. It gets people to go unhinged.

“Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights,” psychological scientist Kathleen Vohs says. “Orderly environments, in contrast, encourage convention and playing it safe.”

Got a few minutes to kill? Watch about the experiments here: