We think that people act the way they do because of their personality. But what effect does their environment have on their behavior? We have all seen the same person act differently in different circumstances. Now a new study by Dutch scientists at Tilburg University in the Netherlands has suggested that a messy environment can cause people to stereotype other people.

They set up a situation in a train station. Caucasian subjects were asked to sit on a bench while they filled out a survey. There was a Dutch-African man sitting on the bench also filling out the survey. The researchers ran the experiment in a clean train station and in a very messy train station. They kept track of how far away the subject sat from the Dutch-African. It turned out that the test subjects were consistently influenced by how messy the station was. If the station was clean, they sat closer to the Dutch-African. If the station was messy, they sat further away from the Dutch-African.

This seems like a very good reason to promote order and cleanliness in public spaces. Maybe we can reduce prejudice a little.