Teams in polluted air took longer to solve collaborative puzzles.

Carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide harmed teams even below WHO safety guidelines.

Nitrogen dioxide and fine particles only mattered well above WHO guideline levels.

The effect was strongest for corporate teams, those most representative of modern workplaces.

Picture a locked room, a countdown clock, and a group of strangers who must combine clues, argue over theories, and assign tasks fast enough to escape before time runs out. It is a strange setting for psychological research. It is also, as it turns out, an excellent one.

A study published in the Journal of Economic Psychology used data from over 15,000 live escape-room games at a single London venue, played between 2018 and 2022, to ask a simple question: Does air pollution make teams worse at working together? The surprising answer is yes, and the effect is not small.

We already knew pollution could dull individual minds. In one striking study, researchers tracked professional chess players across tournaments and found that a rise in indoor fine particulate matter increased a player's odds of making a costly error, with the effect growing worse as the clock ran down. These were elite players, trained for years to think clearly under pressure, and even they were not immune. Related research has found similar penalties for pollution in call centers, courtrooms, and fruit-packing lines. For example, Sarmiento (2022) analyzed thousands of court hearings across Mexican courthouses and found that a 10-unit increase in particulate matter made hearings run 6.7% longer. Extrapolated across the sample, the pollution effect cost roughly 56 additional working days over the three years........

© Psychology Today