Perceptions can prevail over Reality

In the course of your lives you’ve likely seen people respond to spaces and/or objects in them in a way that seems much more subjective than objective.  Rest assured, the differences that you think you’ve seen don’t indicate that something is not working correctly inside your own head—sometimes our perceptions of situations are distorted:

• Sensory experiences can have a halo effect, making simultaneous other experiences seem a little better than they otherwise would. So, if you’re hearing music you enjoy, the space where you are listening will smell better to you.  If you’re asked for your opinion of a space, you’ll rate it at the level of the parameter of the space you are least pleased with—if the heating, and lighting, and soundscape in your office are all great, if the air quality seems not up to snuff, you’ll evaluate that space as not very good, regardless of the heating, lighting, and soundscape.
• If we believe that a condition is averse, for whatever reason, that perception will drive outcomes. If we think a space is very warm, for example, that thought will decrease our performance, we will feel stressed, whether it is actually, by any sort of objective temperature measurement, the temperature in the area is warm.  When the temperature seems too high, assessments of air quality drop.
• One sensory experience can even more broadly influence another, and there are loads of specific examples of this. For example, people feel warmer in places that feature warm colours than they do when cooler colours prevail.  Here at the Space Doctors, we talk about this links regularly.
• When people are in a more negative mood, for whatever reason, their impressions of the physical worlds that surround them are similarly less positive.
• At work, people who have less positive thoughts about their jobs (their pay, their hours, that their work was uninteresting, etc.) have less positive assessments of the physical places where they work. The same goes for people who believe that they are not successful professionally (people who feel successful will rate their physical environment more positively while those who feel less successful professionally will categorize it as more negative). When offices don’t align with users’ self-images, users’ evaluations of them fall.
• How things are labelled can really matter. In one study, people heard the exact same sound, sometimes labelled as the sound of a waterfall other times described as industrial machinery.  People “hearing” the waterfall were less mentally tired and more mentally refreshed after doing mentally demanding work than those in the industrial machinery condition.  Another example:  Being kind to the Earth is generally seen as a plus in our society and when the same light was described as either eco-friendly or not, responses to working in that light differed.  When the light was “environmentally friendly” working in its glow was seen as more comfortable and rigorously quantified mental performance was better than when it was not.
• And the placebo effect is powerfully related to responses to physical experiences—if we think that we’ll be more creative when listening to a particular sound, we are likely to be more creative. The same goes for cognitive performance, etc.  Similarly, if we expect to be less creative in a particular soundscape, our creativity will probably decrease.  If we think some panels on the ceiling are cutting noise levels, we’ll feel a space is quieter and perform accordingly, even if what’s on the ceiling is just left over air conditioner parts, artfully placed.