Research Design Connection: Contagious Concentration

by Sally Augustin, Ph.D. | September 28th, 2015

In a series of well-designed experiments, Desender, Beurms and Van den Bussche learned that if a person is close to someone who is concentrating on a cognitive task, their own concentration improves. Concentration is contagious, as described by the researchers: “the exertion of [mental] effort is contagious.” The researchers hypothesize that seeing the body posture of someone concentrating may make it more likely that the observer will put increased effort into concentrating or that concentration may be contagious because a person concentrating emits a particular smell, which supports the smeller’s mental focus. In many workplaces and similar spaces, people trying to concentrate are working in areas with many distractions, so applying this research there, by creating a “concentration zone” is difficult, unless the people trying to focus mentally are truly shielded, acoustically and visually, from workers who are not concentrating. Another reason to focus on developing “cones of silence”! Kobe …