Messy Room Intelligence: Is a Messy Room a Sign of a High IQ?

A messy room is not a meaningful sign of intelligence. We could find no large study that measured room clutter against IQ directly, and the closest personality trait, "orderliness" (a preference for neatness and organization), correlates only about -.06 with general mental ability in the largest meta-analysis, which works out to less than 1 IQ point per standard deviation.

The idea that brilliant people are messy rests mainly on one famous photograph, a few old sayings and a single 2013 experiment on messy desks and creativity that a larger study later failed to reproduce. This page traces where the "messy genius" claim comes from, what the experiments found, how tidiness relates to IQ in the personality research, and what a cluttered room can actually tell you about the person who lives in it.

Most versions of the claim lean on Albert Einstein. On the day he died in April 1955, LIFE photographer Ralph Morse was let into Einstein's office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and photographed his desk exactly as he had left it, heaped with papers. That picture became one of the best-known images of the physicist and is still shared as proof that great minds work amid chaos.

The quotations that travel with the photo are less solid. The quip "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?" is routinely credited to Einstein, but the research site Quote Investigator found no evidence he said it. The line was attributed to him only in the 2000s; its earliest close match is an anonymous joke printed in the Chicago Tribune in April 1955. A related saying, that a disordered desk is a sign of genius, was already circulating in the 1940s with an unverified credit to Leo Tolstoy.

One photograph of one genius's desk is a case study, and it says nothing about the average messy person. Two confounds make the story look stronger than it is.

• Selection: famous messy desks belong to famous people. Nobody photographs the cluttered desks of the many ordinary people with the same habits.

• Workload: a desk buried in papers can reflect how many projects someone is juggling, which says more about their job than about their ability.

The scientific boost for the idea came from Vohs, Redden and Rahinel (2013), who ran three experiments in Psychological Science. Participants were randomly assigned to work in either a tidy room or a room strewn with papers and clutter.

• Experiment 1: people in the orderly room chose healthier snacks and donated more money.

• Experiment 2: people in the messy room came up with uses for a ping-pong ball that were rated as more creative, even though they generated about the same number of ideas.

• Experiment 3: people in the messy room preferred an option labelled "new", while people in the tidy room preferred one labelled "classic".

The authors argued that disorder nudges people to break with convention. The creativity result was widely covered in the press, often stretched into the claim that messy people are smarter. That leap was never in the study. Creativity is a different trait from intelligence (the two overlap only modestly, as covered in our article on whether a high IQ makes a person more creative), and the experiment measured the effect of a room on a task, with no measure of anyone's habits or IQ.

The creativity finding has also failed its main replication test. Manzi and colleagues (2019) ran a conceptual replication with 100 participants, about twice the original sample, randomly assigned to a neat or messy desk. They used two validated creativity measures plus several tests of executive function. Working at the messy desk made no reliable difference to creativity or to executive control, and the authors concluded that the link between disorder and thinking "seems elusive and does not warrant the claims it generated in the popular press."

Tidiness belongs to "conscientiousness", the Big Five personality trait that covers self-discipline, organization and reliability. This is where the real data on order and intelligence live, and they show a near-zero link with a twist.

In the largest synthesis to date, Stanek and Ones (2023) pooled meta-analyses of personality and cognitive ability. Global conscientiousness correlated about .01 with general mental ability, essentially zero. Its two halves behaved differently:

• Orderliness: the tidy, precise, organized side of conscientiousness correlated about -.06 with general mental ability and about -.08 with fluid reasoning. Multiplying by the IQ standard deviation of 15, that is roughly 1 point or less per standard deviation of tidiness.

• Industriousness: the hard-working, persistent side correlated about .32 with general mental ability, or roughly 5 IQ points per standard deviation.

So neatness itself has almost nothing to do with IQ, while working hard goes with somewhat higher scores. A messy person and a tidy person of equal diligence would be expected to score about the same.

Some older studies did report small negative correlations between conscientiousness and intelligence. Moutafi, Furnham and Paltiel (2004) proposed a "compensation hypothesis": people with lower ability might become more conscientious to keep up. Murray, Johnson, McGue and Iacono (2014) tested this in two large Minnesota family samples that were not selected on achievement and found correlations that were zero or positive. When they artificially restricted their samples to higher achievers, the correlations shifted in a negative direction. Their conclusion was that the negative link may be largely an artifact of studying pre-selected groups, such as students admitted to selective programs, where lower-scoring people tend to make the cut only if they work unusually hard.

Personality traits sit alongside IQ as separate dimensions, a theme covered more broadly in our article on high giftedness and personality. Perfectionism, which concerns the standards people set for their own work, is a separate trait from tidiness.

Rooms do carry some real information about their owners, just not about IQ.

• Personality: in Gosling and colleagues' (2002) study of 94 offices and 83 bedrooms, observers who saw only the room judged the occupant's conscientiousness and openness with some accuracy, using cues such as neatness for conscientiousness and distinctive decoration for openness. Openness, the trait linked to intellectual interests, does correlate modestly with IQ (see our article on curiosity and intelligence), so a room full of varied books may hint at interests more than ability.

• Focus in the moment: a 2014 study by Chae and Zhu found that people working in a disorderly room did worse on a Stroop attention task and gave up sooner on an unsolvable puzzle. The Manzi replication did not find effects on executive function, so this evidence is mixed.

• Hoarding disorder: severe clutter is occasionally a sign of a recognized mental health condition. Hoarding disorder involves persistent difficulty discarding possessions, to the point that clutter makes living spaces hard to use, and a 2019 meta-analysis estimated that about 2.5% of working-age adults have it. It is a separate matter from ordinary untidiness. Anyone worried about it for themselves or a relative can start with a family doctor or a licensed mental health professional.

No. Orderliness, the trait behind tidiness, correlates about -.06 with general mental ability, which is close to zero. Messy and tidy people score about the same on IQ tests on average.

No. The 2013 study by Vohs and colleagues tested whether a messy room boosted creativity on one task, and it did not measure IQ. A larger 2019 replication found no creativity effect.

There is no evidence that they are. The idea rests largely on the 1955 photograph of Einstein's desk and on sayings that were later misattributed to him.

On average they are about as conscientious as anyone else. Global conscientiousness correlates about .01 with IQ, and the hard-working side of the trait correlates positively with it.

Possibly, a little. One study found poorer attention and persistence in a cluttered room, but a later replication found no effect on executive function.

A messy room is not evidence of a high IQ, and a tidy one is not evidence of a low one. Tidiness is almost unrelated to intelligence, while diligence is modestly related to it, and the famous messy-desk creativity effect did not replicate. If you are curious about your actual reasoning ability, rather than what your desk might imply, take a full-length online IQ test and leave the clutter out of it.

1. Vohs, K. D., Redden, J. P., & Rahinel, R. (2013). Physical order produces healthy choices, generosity, and conventionality, whereas disorder produces creativity. Psychological Science, 24(9), 1860-1867. [doi.org/10.1177/0956797613480186](. doi.org

2. Manzi, A., Durmysheva, Y., Pinegar, S. K., Rogers, A., & Ramos, J. (2019). Workspace disorder does not influence creativity and executive functions. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2662. [doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02662](. doi.org

3. Stanek, K. C., & Ones, D. S. (2023). Meta-analytic relations between personality and cognitive ability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(23), e2212794120. [doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2212794120](. doi.org

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7. Chae, B., & Zhu, R. (2014). Environmental disorder leads to self-regulatory failure. Journal of Consumer Research, 40(6), 1203-1218. [doi.org/10.1086/674547](. doi.org

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9. Mataix-Cols, D. (2014). Hoarding disorder. New England Journal of Medicine, 370(21), 2023-2030. [doi.org/10.1056/NEJMcp1313051](. doi.org

10. Quote Investigator. (2017). If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, we can't help wondering what an empty desk indicates. [quoteinvestigator.com](. quoteinvestigator.com

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12. Banks, M. (2010, April 20). The day Einstein died. Physics World. [physicsworld.com](. physicsworld.com

Hero image: Tools and parts are scattered on a workbench in a garage, by Shixart1985, CC BY 2.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.