Walk into a sun-drenched office with polished wood floors, plants in the corner, and a designer desk, and you might feel a jolt of ambition. Surely, you think, this is the kind of space where great work happens. Companies have spent fortunes on the same intuition, betting that beautiful workplaces produce better output.
But does the appeal of a workspace actually translate into better performance, or does it just feel like it should? A new set of studies published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology suggests the answer is closer to the second option. People consistently expect to be more productive in attractive offices, yet when researchers measured actual task performance, the aesthetic quality of the environment barely registered.
A gap between expectation and performance
Emily Zohar and Dirk B. Walther of the University of Toronto’s Department of Psychology set out to test something that architects, designers, and office managers have long taken for granted. Prior research has established that people are drawn to pleasant surroundings and that certain design features, such as natural light or biophilic elements, can influence mood and well-being. But the specific question of whether the aesthetic appeal of a space, on its own, drives measurable productivity has been surprisingly underexplored.
The researchers wanted to separate two things that often get tangled together in workplace research: what people believe about their productivity in a given environment, and what they actually produce. If a beautiful office makes you think you’re doing better work, that’s one kind of effect. If it makes your work objectively better, that’s another entirely.
Building a library of offices
To run the investigation, Zohar and Walther first needed a large and varied set of office images. They pulled photos from an annotated indoor-scenes dataset and a commercial interior design database, then supplemented these with targeted searches for “ugly offices” and “boring office desks” to ensure the collection spanned the full range of visual appeal. After having a preliminary group of participants rate the images, they narrowed the pool to 199 offices covering everything from dreary cubicles to magazine-worthy suites.
Across three studies involving 550 participants recruited through the Prolific platform, the researchers ran a series of experiments that shared this same stimulus set but asked different questions of it.
What people expect from a pretty office
In the first two studies, participants simply looked at office images and rated them on aesthetic appeal (“How much do you enjoy looking at this office?”) and on anticipated productivity, using questions adapted from a standard workplace health questionnaire. They were asked how much work they expected to complete in each space, how creative they thought they’d be, how well they’d be able to concentrate, and whether they’d want to work there.
The results were striking in their consistency. The more attractive participants found an office, the more productive they expected to be in it. The correlation between aesthetic appeal and anticipated work quantity was extremely high, as was the link between appeal and anticipated creativity. People also overwhelmingly preferred to work in the more appealing spaces.
The correlations were so tight, in fact, that the researchers noted a caveat: participants may not have been cleanly separating “I like this office” from “I’d do good work here.” The judgments may partly reflect a single, overall evaluative response to each space rather than distinct assessments.
Testing whether beliefs match reality
The final study was designed to answer the harder question. If aesthetic appeal really does boost productivity, it should show up in actual performance, not just in what people say they expect. So the researchers built a task.
Participants viewed a sequence of 15 office images, one at a time. After each image appeared, they chose whether to attempt an easy or a hard version of a word-association puzzle. The easier puzzles included antonyms of common words as well as simpler items from the Remote Associates Test. The harder ones were more difficult items from the Remote Associates Test, which presents three words (like “paint,” “doll,” and “cat”) and asks for a fourth word that connects them all (in this case, “house”). The office image stayed on screen while participants worked, allowing the researchers to measure three things: motivation (whether people chose the hard task), accuracy (whether they got it right), and speed (how quickly they responded).
If beautiful offices really do enhance productivity, participants viewing more appealing spaces should have chosen harder tasks, answered more accurately, or responded faster. They didn’t. Across all three performance measures, aesthetic appeal had essentially no reliable effect. The researchers ran both traditional statistical tests and a Bayesian analysis, which quantifies how much the data support one hypothesis over another. The Bayesian results indicated that the data were substantially more likely under a model that excluded aesthetic appeal than under one that included it.
There was one small statistical blip: reaction times were very slightly faster in more appealing offices. But the effect was tiny, accounting for about 0.3 percent of the variation in response times, and the Bayesian analysis again favored the null hypothesis. The authors interpret this as unlikely to reflect a meaningful relationship.
Meanwhile, aesthetic appeal remained strongly associated with how much participants said they’d like to work in each space, mirroring the earlier findings on preference.
Personality mattered more than the room
What did predict actual performance? Personality traits. Participants who scored higher on openness to experience, one of the Big Five personality dimensions associated with curiosity and imagination, tended to be more accurate on the word-association tasks, though they were also slower. Conscientious participants responded faster but were somewhat less accurate, possibly because the tasks emphasized creative associative thinking rather than the diligent, methodical work that conscientiousness typically supports.
The pattern ran counter to what the researchers had initially hypothesized. They expected people high in openness to be especially susceptible to the pull of beautiful spaces. Instead, openness was unrelated to preference for aesthetic environments, while conscientious participants showed stronger preferences overall.
What the study can and cannot tell us
The researchers are careful to point out the boundaries of their findings. Participants viewed static images on their computers rather than sitting in real offices. Longer exposure to an actual physical space, with its air quality, acoustics, temperature, and social atmosphere, might produce different results. Prior work on biophilic design has found genuine productivity benefits from natural elements, but those studies typically include functional features (better air, real plants, actual daylight) that go beyond visual appeal alone.
The word-association tasks also capture only a narrow slice of what “productivity” means in a real workplace. Knowledge work involves sustained problem-solving, collaboration, and creativity over hours or days, not 15-second puzzles. It’s possible that aesthetic environments influence performance on longer, richer tasks in ways this design couldn’t detect.
The measure of aesthetic appeal itself was also limited to a single-item enjoyment rating, which captures immediate liking but not the fuller experience of beauty, which research suggests forms more slowly and draws on comparison with learned templates.
What it means for how we design workspaces
For companies weighing investments in office design, the takeaway is nuanced rather than dismissive. The authors argue that beautiful offices still matter, just not for the reason most people assume. Aesthetic appeal reliably shapes where people want to work and how they feel about being there. That has real value for recruiting, retention, employee well-being, and morale. It just doesn’t appear to be a lever for squeezing more output out of the same worker.
The researchers frame this as a disconnect between belief and reality. When people say they’d be more productive in an attractive space, that belief may function as a kind of after-the-fact justification for wanting to be there, rather than an accurate forecast of their performance. The office you dream of working in is genuinely more pleasant. Whether it makes you better at your job is another question, and one this research suggests should be answered with more skepticism than intuition typically allows.
