Disorderly surroundings can feed stereotypes, Dutch study finds

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.

Testing the relationship between disorder and discrimination in real-life situations was no easy feat, said social psychologist Diederik Stapel, the study's lead author.

But he got lucky - the cleaners at the bustling Utrecht train station went on strike, leaving disorder in their wake.

"It looked like a terrible mess," said study coauthor Siegwart Lindenberg, a cognitive sociologist. "Lots of paper cups, chewed up pieces of pizza, napkins, apple cores - you name it - just lying around."

It was the perfect setup. The two researchers canvassed the station, asking 40 travelers (all of them white) to fill out surveys about Muslims, homosexuals and Dutch people while in the messy train station. Respondents were asked to rate how accurate they thought both positive and negative stereotypes were for each group.

The researchers asked the travelers to sit down while filling out the survey, noting how far the survey-taker chose to sit from a man positioned at one end of the row. That man was either black or white.

When the strike ended a few days later, the researchers repeated the experiments in the newly tidy station.

The result: When the station was messy, travelers agreed with stereotypes - both positive and negative - about 10 percent more strongly.

They also sat about 25 percent farther from a black man than they did from a white man.