People who always clean up after themselves at restaurants usually display these 7 unique behaviors, says psychology

Rigid-patterned people also have a strong sense of personal responsibility for keeping things in order and making everything right. Often this leads them to take on responsibility for things that are beyond their control and not really their job.

After careful consideration, however, I came to the conclusion that it makes far more sense to categorize people by their actions rather than by some generalized personality trait. Using this approach, people who can’t stay tidy can be categorized into just three types: the “can’t-throw-it-away” type, the “can’t-put-it-back” type, and the “first-tw

Over a week, students in one group were told by teachers, janitors, and others that they were extremely neat—in fact, they had one of the neatest classrooms in their school. Children in the second group were simply used to be neat—told to pick up their trash, tidy their

Identity greatly influences our behavior. People tend to align their actions with how they see themselves.

As we examined the rooms, we began to notice their occupants’ psychological footprints and to glimpse the different ways personality is expressed. Three broad mechanisms—identity claims, feeling regulators, and behavioral residue—seemed to connect people to the spaces that surrounded them.

The trick is to identify the choices that work out poorly, and work backward to identify the first signs of errant decision-making, like Mike’s “let me take care of that for you.” In his case, he noticed an emotional surge that preceded those inauspicious words. He described it as an anxiety that welled up from his gut, a compulsion to put the worl