"Picture yourself in a well-kept room — pictures neatly hung on walls, books organized on a shelf, floors clear of junk. Now sit yourself in a room with crooked pictures, scattered books and dirty laundry on the floor. Feeling any different?
In the second room, you might be more apt to keep your distance from a person of another race, believe that Muslims are aggressive or think that gay people are creative, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.
The idea, said researchers from Tilburg University in the Netherlands, is that
people in messy environments tend to compensate for that disorder by categorizing people in their minds according to well-known stereotypes."
