Does Your Big Office Chair Make You Behave Dishonestly?

October 10, 2013 After discovering that people who assume “expansive” by postures are more likely to steal and cheat, a team of researchers led by Andy J. Yap of MIT’s Sloan School of Management suggests that office layout and furniture might induce negative behavior. When bodily postures are incidentally expanded by the structure of physical spaces, people “could be lured into behaving dishonestly,” the researchers say. The team found that vehicles with larger driver’s seats were more likely to be double-parked in New York City; at 1 standard deviation above the mean in driver’s seat size, the probability that the vehicle would be double-parked increased from 51% to 71%. SOURCE: The Ergonomics of Dishonesty: The Effect of Incidental Posture on Stealing, Cheating, and Traffic Violations

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