Seeing the forest in order and the trees in disorder: Environmental orderliness versus disorderliness affects the perceptual processing style

Abstract

People attend to the same event or object by using a global or local processing style across different environments. Different physical environmental conditions, such as orderliness and disorderliness, activate different psychological states and produce different kinds of outcomes. However, previous work has rarely examined whether individuals exposed to different orderly or disorderly environments attend to the “global” or the “local” differently. Thus, in the current study, we conducted three behavioral experiments to directly examine the impact of disorder versus order cues on people's types of perceptual and conceptual processing (global vs. local). We asked participants to perform a typical Kimchi–Palmer figures task or a categorization task: with pre‐primed disorderly or orderly physical environmental pictures (Experiment 1), with basic visual pictures (Experiment 2), and imagining a real environment (Experiment 3). The results revealed that in any of the above operations, orderly experience led to global perceptual processing, whereas disorderly experience led to local perceptual processing. This difference in processing style was not influenced by the participants’ daily habits or their preference for the need for structure. However, this difference in perceptual processing style did not spill over to the conceptual processing style. These findings provide direct evidence of the effects of disorderliness versus orderliness on global versus local perceptual and conceptual processing and imply that environmental orderliness or disorderliness may functionally affect cognitive processing (i.e., how we see and think about events and objects). Thus, the findings creatively bridge several lines of research and shed light on a basic cognitive mechanism responsible for perceptions of order/disorder.

Environmental Orderliness Affects Self-Control and Creative Thinking: The Moderating Effects of Trait Self-Control

“…Furthermore, the explanation based on the available self-control resources could be used not only for the effect of environmental orderliness on self-control behaviors and creative thinking; it might also be used to explain other psychological and behavioral effects of environmental orderliness. For example, an orderly experience leads to global perceptual processing, whereas a disorderly experience leads to local perceptual processing (Li et al, 2019b ), which may be because order increases the available self-control resources and disorder reduces the available self-control resources. A previous study has shown that the available self-control resources do play important roles in perceptual processing (Bruyneel and Dewitte, 2006 ).…”

“…Future research should consider directly comparing the two dependent variables under the same paradigm. In addition, future research could explore whether other dependent variables, such as immoral and illegal behavior (Keizer et al, 2008 ) perceptual processing (Li et al, 2019b ), are also moderated by trait self-control. If this hypothesis of a moderating role is still supported, it will provide more reliable evidence, which supports the suggestion that available self-control resources are the key mechanisms behind the psychological and behavioral effects of environmental orderliness.…”

“…Environmental orderliness refers to the degree of order or disorder of the physical environment. As a feature of the physical environment, environmental orderliness has many psychological and behavioral consequences, such as immoral and illegal behavior (Keizer et al, 2008 ), confirmatory information processing (Niedernhuber et al, 2014 ), construal level, and global-local perceptual processing (Li et al, 2019a , b ). Environmental orderliness has also been shown to affect behavioral self-control and creative thinking.…”