I have a theory that your siblings determine how tidy you are in your adult life, but I am not exactly sure how it all works out.
My theory is based on public goods and free-riding. If as a kid you shared a room then you and your sibling didn’t internalize the full marginal social value of your efforts at tidying up and as a consequence your room was probably a mess. At least messier than it would have been if you had the room to yourself.
This would suggest that if you want to know whether your girlfriend is going to be a tidy roommate when you shack up one easy clue is whether she has a sister. If not then she probably had a room to herself and she is probably accustomed to tidiness.
But here is where I start to think it can go the other way. A kid who shares a room needs to adapt to the free-rider problem. It pays off if she can develop a tit-for-tat strategy with her sibling to maintain incentives for mutual tidiness. This kind of behavioral response is most credible when it stems from an innate preference for cleanliness. Bottom line, it can be optimal for a room-sharing sibling to become more fussy about a clean room.
As I said I am not sure how it all balances out. But I have a few data points. I have two brothers and we were all slobs as kids but now I am very tidy. My wife has no sisters and if I put enough negatives in this sentence then when she reads this it will be hard for her to figure out how untidy I am herein denying she never fails not to be.
Her brothers also cannot be accused of coming dangerously close to godliness either but I don’t think they shared a room much as kids. One of them now lives in an enviably tidy home but I credit that to his wife who I believe grew up with two sisters.
My son has his own room and at age 5 he is already the cleanest person in our house. He is also the best dressed so there may be something more going on there. My two daughters have been known to occasionally tunnel through the pile of laundry on their (shared) floor just to remind themselves of the color of their carpet.
I have a cousin whom I once predicted would eventually check herself into a padded cell mainly because those things are impeccably tidy. She always had her own room as a kid. Sandeep is an interesting case because as far as I know he has no brothers and while his home sparkles (at least whenever they are having guests) his office is appalling.
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May 23, 2012 at 9:09 am
Mom
Tidiness is next to godliness! I am very tidy and always have been. I shared the living room couch with my sister as a kid! (no bedroom) It drove me crazy that I had slobs for kids but now they are all tidy. Well one is still a slob when he comes to my house. I wonder which one that is? 🙂 🙂
May 23, 2012 at 9:18 am
twicker
So, I’ll accept that there’s at least *some* correlation between siblings and adult tidiness, but I’d be willing to bet any amount of money that the effect is tiny in comparison to the effect of the norms established in the home – which are very largely driven by the parents, with further large effects from the general environment.
Siblings likely play a role only by showing what is or is not acceptable behavior (classic Banduran social learning), which I’d bet would also be more important within the sibling effect than public goods or free-riding. For example, free-riding depends not only on the other sibling deciding to act counter to the free riding, but also on the *parents* acting against it consistently (I’d be willing to bet that there’d be a good bit of, “Mommy/Daddy, tell X not to b such a pig!”).
And as far as Sandeep’s office goes, messy offices seem to be a norm in academia. 🙂
May 23, 2012 at 9:21 am
Steve
I shared a room with 4 brothers. Two of my brothers were slobs (oldest and youngest) and three of us were tidy. As adults we are all tidy! 🙂
May 23, 2012 at 11:26 pm
julian
Johannes and I have a paper (well, more like a couple of theorems from years ago, since there’s no actual paper) showing an anti-folk-theorem for dirty rooms. Surprisingly to us at the time, even if there is unbounded disutility from dirt and sequential moves, a messy sibling (or roommate) can’t in equilibrium necessarily force their tidy partner to do most of the cleaning. Not sure if this explains how it can go either way in your model or not.
May 26, 2012 at 11:48 pm
Sandeep Baliga
I work from home as much as I can. As you (implicitly) point out, my home office is tidy.
May 27, 2012 at 8:10 pm
anon
I have to disagree with one basic premise: that when sharing a room, one does not internalize the full effect of messiness. I submit that messiness is a public good in a shared room, so that despite the externalities, the messy person bears as much of the cost as she would if she did not have to share the room.
May 27, 2012 at 10:13 pm
twicker
Not sure how you’re defining cost: certainly, the messy person doesn’t perceive the cost to be sufficient to lead to immediate cleaning behavior (otherwise, the room wouldn’t be messy).
It’s pretty much a given that the value of cleanliness/non-messiness is greater for those who are rapidly or immediately motivated to clean (ergo, the reason they clean instead of doing something else with a higher value – because cleaning is the thing with the higher value). Likewise, the value of cleanliness/non-messiness (and, therefore, the cost of messiness) is lower for the messy person, i.e., for the person who is not motivated to clean (and, thus, for whom all those other activities hold a higher value/payoff).
Much like people hold different values for different things, and, thus, incur differing costs for not having those things, I’d absolutely assume that messy people don’t incur as high a cost from the messy room as tidy people do.
June 14, 2012 at 1:16 pm
Theories of tidiness, part 1
[…] This blog post is somewhat tongue in cheek, but interesting nonetheless. If I had my own room growing up, would I be more tidy? I can see how it could impact future habits. […]
May 11, 2015 at 2:44 am
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