The Cathedral Effect: Higher ceilings can make us more creative by triggering feelings of freedom and encouraging people to see broader abstract connections.
Paper: Influence of Ceiling Height: The Effect of Priming on the Type of Processing That People Use
When people are in rooms with high ceilings, they think differently than when they're in rooms with low ceilings.
Edward Hall, an American anthropologist and research pioneer in cross-cultural research, noted that a small chapel is likely to convey the notion of confinement or restrictedness, while a grand cathedral feels vast and open. This changes how our minds work, and is known as "The Cathedral Effect".
Moore et al. also proposed that low ceilings may encourage quieter, more restricted play in their Recommendations for Child Care Centers. J. Meyers-Levy and R. Zhu concluded that people in rooms with high ceilings tend to:
- Be primed of freedom-related concepts instead of confinement-related ones.
- Rely more on abstract and relational elaboration instead of item-specific.
- Find more commonalities instead of differences.
- Solve problems in more nontraditional and creative ways.
These effects happen only when people notice the ceiling height. So it doesn't work if they're oblivious to their surroundings. The vertical volume of the room primes concepts of either freedom or confinement, which in turn influences how people process information and solve problems.
Thanks to Lewis O’Brien for sharing this with me!