Answer key

I had a professor at the University of Kentucky who studied psychological effects of physical spaces on people. I know that sounds weird, but she had a great example:

In your house, a light-bulb burns out. It’s a special light-bulb that you don’t have in the house, plus it’s in a really weird place and you’d need to get out the ladder to change it, and it has one of those glass shades over it that you’d have to unscrew… So you put off changing the light-bulb. You don’t get around to it because it’s complicated and when you’re at home you want things simple. It makes sense; it’s one of those annoying chores you just don’t want to even remember to do.

But then you walk past the light switch. You know the light-bulb is burned out. But you turn on the light switch anyway. Every time you walk past the light switch, no matter how many times you do it, you turn on the light switch. And each time you say to yourself, “Duh! Why am I so stupid? I know the light-bulb is burned out.”

And that’s a psychological effect of a physical space. Your environment, the light switch you use several times a day every day you’ve lived in that house, has conditioned you to respond in a certain way. In this case, you responded by flipping a switch.

At my old job, I needed a set of keys to get into the restroom, and I always had them in my pocket. I worked there for three years, and several times a day five days a week, I would open the bathroom door with my set of keys.

At my new job, I need a set of keys to get into my office, and I always have them in my pocket. As I walk to the bathroom, I reach back into my pocket and get out the key to my office. I hold the key to bathroom door, and my mind somersaults while my brain remembers, “Duh, you don’t need a key to open this bathroom door.”

I’ve never been caught holding my key to an unlocked bathroom door, but I’m embarrassed by it every time. Each time my brain flip-flops, I go back to the old hallway and see the marble floors and the locked mahogany door, until I remember that now I work in an industrial-carpeted building with large public restrooms. I blush, thinking how silly and impractical it is to imagine these bathroom doors locked.

Culture shock from leaving Chicago strikes in even the smallest ways. Like in the keys that lock and unlock my brain.