How Your Environment Shapes Belonging: 5 Science-Backed Ways to Set the Scene

What a Bluetooth speaker, a bottle of wine and a very tense gnocchi class taught me about belonging

Day five of a Drunk Yoga® retreat in Tuscany, and the whole thing had gone sideways.

The power had gone out at the rustic villa we were staying in, which meant no Wi-Fi. Meaning, none of us could check the work emails we had all promised not to check. It had also been raining, so retreat attendees were just in sort of a dreary mood. To top it off, that afternoon, the group had a pasta-making class scheduled that they’d decided (at the last minute) they no longer wanted. When they tried to cancel, they learned they couldn’t get a refund. So now, it was about 5pm and they were making gnocchi against their will in the foothills of Tuscany.

The tension in the kitchen was so thick that even the chef kept glancing at me. He didn’t speak much English, but his face was very clear: Signora. Do something.

Here is what I know from years of doing this belonging-design work: when a group is that far gone, talking about it does not help. Nobody in that kitchen wanted to be invited into a “feelings circle.” They wanted to be somewhere else, with someone else, and ideally, with Wi-Fi.

So, I walked back to my cottage and picked up three things: a Bluetooth speaker, a bottle of the organic red wine they’d made on the vinyard and four wine glasses. I came back to the tense gnocchi-cooking kitchen, poured a glass for everyone, started paying jazz music and opened the double doors along the side of the kitchen to expose the gorgeous sunset over the hills.

Within ten minutes the group was laughing, elbow-deep in potato dough and taking selfies with the now-jovial Italian chef. Nothing about their previous circumstances had changed. As in, the power was still out and the class was still non-refundable. What changed was their physical container.

Containers shape perspectives.

Our containers shape what we see. What we see shapes the story we tell about the experience we are having. And belonging comes down to storytelling. Am I with my people, or am I stuck with these people? Is this happening for me or to me? We rarely pause to reflect and consciously decide the answer. We absorb it from the environment and then narrate it back to ourselves as if it were a fact about the group.

Which is convenient, because environments are much easier to change than people's minds.

Feng shui has been saying a version of this for a few thousand years, and modern environmental psychology also arrives at the same doorstep from a different direction. The traditional "command position" (place the bed or desk so you can see the entrance without sitting directly in its path) lines up neatly with what geographer Jay Appleton called prospect and refuge: the human preference for a wide view from a protected spot. The empirical record on prospect-refuge is genuinely mixed, so hold it loosely. But the broader finding is not in dispute. Light, shape, sightlines and thresholds move people - reliably and measurably.

Here are five practical applications, both personally and professionally.

1. Change the light before you change the conversation

Alison Jing Xu and Aparna Labroo ran six studies on ambient brightness and found that bright light makes people feel physically warmer, and that warmth cranks up the intensity of whatever they are already feeling. Bright light polarized judgments in both directions. Participants under bright lights rated an ambiguous character as more aggressive, wanted spicier food and reacted more strongly to both pleasant and unpleasant words.

Translation: overhead fluorescents are an amplifier. If the group is annoyed, bright light will make them more annoyed.

Try it at home: one lamp instead of the ceiling light at dinner. Candles for a hard conversation with your partner.

Try it at work: before a tense meeting, kill the overheads and turn on the lamps. If you are stuck in a conference space with no dimmer, move to the one with windows and use daylight instead.

2. Put the seating in a curve

Rui Zhu and Jennifer Argo published a study in the Journal of Consumer Research showing that the geometry of a seating arrangement primes fundamental needs. Circular arrangements primed a need to belong. Angular arrangements primed a need to be unique. People seated in circles responded more favorably to messages about prioritizing family and friends. People seated in angles preferred the message about prioritizing themselves.

The shape of the furniture is running a background program on everyone's sense of self. King Arthur was onto something.

Try it at home: a round table for the dinner party. Chairs pulled into a loose curve instead of a facing line.

Try it at work: if the goal is cohesion, get people off the long rectangular table. If you cannot move the table, move the people. Pull chairs into a circle for the first fifteen minutes and let them return to the table after.

3. Open a sightline

In 1984 Roger Ulrich published a study in Science comparing gallbladder surgery patients assigned to hospital beds with a view of trees against matched patients whose windows faced a brick wall. The tree-view patients had shorter stays, needed fewer strong painkillers and collected fewer negative comments in their nurses' notes.

A view of trees. That was the medicine.

Try it at home: move your desk so it faces the window and put a wall at your back. That combination of visibility plus backing is the thing feng shui practitioners have been prescribing for centuries.

Try it at work: open the blinds nobody has touched since 2019. Face the group toward the light rather than toward the whiteboard. And if you are hosting, throw the doors open. (That was my winning move in Tuscany. Those hills had been there all week, but nobody could see them.)

4. Cross a threshold on purpose

Gabriel Radvansky at Notre Dame studied why we forget what we came into a space to do, and found the culprit is the doorway itself. Passing through one creates what he calls an event boundary in the mind, which files away the previous episode and starts a new one. It replicated in both virtual and physical environments.

The forgetting is usually treated as a bug. Use it as a feature. When a group is marinating in a mood, physically move them. The threshold does the reset for you.

Try it at home: do not process the bad day on the same couch where you had it. Take the conversation to the porch or around the block.

Try it at work: when a meeting stalls, walk the group to a different floor, a different space or outside. Ten minutes and one doorway will do more than another round of "so, thoughts?"

5. Put one thing in the middle

Kaitlin Woolley and Ayelet Fishbach ran a study published in Psychological Science on shared plates. Pairs of participants ate chips and salsa either from their own bowls or from one shared bowl, then negotiated a contentious labor dispute. The shared-bowl pairs cooperated more, reached agreement faster and endured shorter strikes. It held for strangers as well as friends. The mechanism was not warm feelings toward the other person. It was the physical coordination of reaching into the same bowl.

Worth noting: the researchers were clear that a buffet does not produce the same effect. The magic is in the passing.

Try it at home: serve family-style. One bowl in the center that everyone has to reach toward.

Try it at work: one platter per table instead of individually boxed lunches. One pitcher. One shared object people have to negotiate around.

That bottle of wine in the Tuscan kitchen was doing exactly this. One bottle, four glasses, many people. They had to hand it to each other.

The takeaway

When a group is stuck, the instinct is to address the mood. Name it, process it, work through it. Sometimes that is right. Often the mood is a symptom of a container that is telling everyone a story about isolation, and the fastest way to change the story is to change the container.

Move the light. Curve the seating. Open a sightline. Cross a threshold. Put something in the middle.

Then let people arrive at a better story on their own. They will think they got there themselves, which is the point.

Set the Scene is one of the 12 Belonging Hacks in my P.L.A.Y. Method. Reach out to us to learn how we incorporate this and other belonging hacks into the social wellness experiences we design for team-building events, conferences and corporate retreats.

Sources

• Xu, A. J. and Labroo, A. A. (2014). Incandescent affect: Turning on the hot emotional system with bright light. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 24(2), 207-216.

• Zhu, R. and Argo, J. J. (2013). Exploring the impact of various shaped seating arrangements on persuasion. Journal of Consumer Research, 40(2).

• Ulrich, R. S. (1984). View through a window may influence recovery from surgery. Science, 224(4647), 420-421.

• Radvansky, G. A., Krawietz, S. A. and Tamplin, A. K. (2011). Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Further explorations. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64(8), 1632-1645.

• Woolley, K. and Fishbach, A. (2019). Shared plates, shared minds: Consuming from a shared plate promotes cooperation. Psychological Science.

• Appleton, J. (1975). The Experience of Landscape. On prospect and refuge. See also Dosen, A. S. and Ostwald, M. J. (2016) for a meta-analysis showing mixed empirical support.