The Psychological Effects of Office Plants and Indoor Plants on People - Study 2

M.Sc. environmental psychology students from Surrey University conducted two case studies in 1997. The experiments were designed to examine the effects of office plants and indoor plants on people in a simulated working environment.

Study 2: Human Responses to Office Interior planting                                                                    By Matthew Hampshire

This study examined the levels of interior plants needed in an office to evoke a response. The experiments tested a hypothesis that said that as the presence of plants for the office increases, so will the positive perception of that space up to an optimum level. An office was furnished and interior plants were positioned in the office at six different densities, ranging form zero to very heavily planted. The room was photographed at the different densities so that each incremental increase in office plant density was approximately 6 percent greater than the previous in terms of the area of the photograph containing indoor plants.

The photographs were shown to a group of individuals, who were asked several questions about the pictures they saw. First, participants were shown a picture for 30 seconds, after which they were asked to recall the objects other than plants in the picture. The results of this experiment suggest that interior planting density had no significant bearing on short-term recall.

The second test was an examination of the perception of the office at the various interior planting levels. Participants were asked to judge the office using bipolar adjectives. This means that participants were asked to score the room on a scale of one to seven for each pair of opposite adjectives, such as friendly and unfriendly or complex and simple. Eighteen such pairs of adjectives were chosen for the test. The results showed that, generally, the positive perception of the office increased as indoor plants were introduced. The final test asked participants to rank the photographs in order of preference. The clear result from this experiment showed an aversion to the unplanted room, whereas the preference for the other interior planting levels was less obvious. Very dense indoor planting levels were disliked, as it was thought that such high levels of indoor planting might make the office impractical to use. The results suggest that the arrangement of the plants for the office may have a dramatic effect on perception independent of the quantity of office plants. The introduction of a dominant trough into the scene had a disproportionate effect on perception for the increase in ofice plant density it caused. This study demonstrated a positive perception toward plants in an office, although it is hard to extract the reasons for such perceptions. Further work on this is required to find out what it is about plants in offices people like and whether good design of plant displays is as important as the number of plant in an office.

Contact for further information:

Helen Russell, The Berries, The Street Bury, West Sussex, England, RH20 1PF. UK

David Uzzell, Department of Psychology,, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, England, GU2 5XH. UK

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