Why Do People Like Working in Coffee Shops? Ambient Noise, Focus, and Social Presence
Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: September 28, 2026 · Editorial Policy
People often like working in coffee shops because a café can combine several things that are hard to reproduce at home or in a conventional office: a moderate level of sensory stimulation, physical separation from domestic routines, a visible field of other people who are also occupied, a limited set of immediate distractions, and a repeatable ritual that marks the beginning of a work session. For some tasks and some people, that combination can make starting work easier and can make sustained effort feel less isolating.
The evidence, however, is more specific than the popular idea that “coffee shops make you productive.” Research has found that moderate ambient noise can improve performance on certain creative tasks, while intelligible background speech can impair reading and verbal memory. Classic social-facilitation research also shows that the presence of other people can slightly help some simple or well-practiced tasks while hurting more complex performance. Direct studies of people who work in cafés describe focused work, escape from home or office distractions, and the appeal of working alone in a social setting, but much of that café-specific evidence is qualitative rather than experimental.
So the most accurate answer is: coffee shops can be useful work environments when their sound level, social atmosphere, task demands, and your own preferences happen to fit. The “coffee shop effect” is not one effect. It is a bundle of acoustic, social, contextual, and behavioral mechanisms. For the broader environmental and social psychology of cafes beyond the work-specific question, see The Psychology of Coffee Shops: Why Cafes Feel Good to Work, Think, and Meet In.
Why can working in a coffee shop feel easier than working at home?
A home office gives you control, privacy, and familiarity, but it also contains cues for many activities that have nothing to do with work: food, chores, entertainment, sleep, family interaction, personal messages, and unfinished household tasks. A coffee shop narrows the immediate behavioral menu. You arrive with a laptop, notebook, or book; you choose a seat; you order something; and the environment implicitly defines the next hour or two as a bounded session.
That explanation is partly supported by direct qualitative research. In a multimethod study of “customer-workers” in third places such as coffee shops, participants described going to these spaces both to enable focused work and to obtain some of the social benefits of independent work. The researchers treated productive third places as a distinct work setting rather than simply a place to consume coffee. Mimoun and Gruen’s 2021 study is especially relevant because it examines people who intentionally use third places as workplaces.
An earlier coffee-shop study likewise found that many patrons used cafés for solitary work, studying, and productivity, while also valuing a form of collective presence: people could work alone while surrounded by others doing similar things. Garner’s observational and interview-based study is useful direct evidence for this pattern, although it does not establish that the café caused higher objective productivity.
The distinction matters. Feeling more motivated, getting started faster, enjoying a session more, and objectively producing better work are different outcomes. A person may prefer the café because it reduces procrastination or loneliness even when a laboratory measure of memory or proofreading would be better in silence.
The coffee shop effect is not one psychological mechanism
Online discussions often compress the appeal of café work into a single story: “70 decibels is the perfect focus level,” “other people make you productive,” or “novelty releases dopamine.” The research does not support a universal rule of that kind. A café changes several dimensions at once, and those dimensions can push performance in opposite directions.
The main mechanisms worth separating are ambient sound, speech intelligibility, social presence, environmental separation, repeated context cues, weak social contact, caffeine, and the type of task being performed. The same person can benefit from one mechanism and be impaired by another during the same session.
Ambient noise: why a moderate level can help creativity
The most famous scientific result behind the “coffee shop effect” comes from a series of five experiments by Ravi Mehta, Rui Zhu, and Amar Cheema. Participants exposed to moderate ambient noise at about 70 dB performed better on creative-cognition tasks than participants exposed to lower noise around 50 dB, while high noise around 85 dB reduced creativity. The researchers proposed that moderate noise increased processing difficulty enough to promote more abstract processing, which in turn supported creative thinking. The original Journal of Consumer Research paper is the source of the widely repeated 70 dB finding.
This result is important, but it has a narrow interpretation. It does not show that 70 dB is the ideal level for concentration, studying, programming, proofreading, memory, or productivity in general. It shows that, in those experiments, a moderate level of ambient noise improved particular creative outcomes compared with quieter and louder conditions.
That distinction explains why a café can feel excellent for brainstorming, outlining, sketching, early-stage writing, or generating alternatives while being a poor place to proofread a legal document or memorize technical material. “Focus” is not one cognitive process. Creative idea generation, sustained attention, working memory, language comprehension, error monitoring, and memory encoding have different vulnerability to distraction.
There is no universal magic decibel number
A decibel reading alone cannot tell you whether a café will help. Two spaces can have the same average sound level while being cognitively very different. One may contain a diffuse hum of ventilation, dishes, and many overlapping voices; another may contain one highly intelligible conversation at the next table. The second can be far more distracting even if a sound meter reports the same overall level.
The practical lesson from the moderate-noise research is therefore not “find exactly 70 dB.” It is to notice whether the environment provides background texture without repeatedly capturing your attention. If you keep involuntarily following nearby conversations, reacting to sudden grinder noise, or rereading the same sentence, the soundscape is no longer functioning as neutral stimulation.
Why speech is different from general background noise
Human speech is unusually effective at pulling attention because it contains changing, meaningful information. That is why a café’s acoustic character matters more than the simple label “noisy.” A broad murmur of many conversations can be easier to ignore than one clear conversation whose words are understandable.
A 2020 systematic review examined laboratory studies that manipulated the intelligibility of irrelevant speech. Across 14 studies and 34 tests, verbal short-term memory was especially sensitive to intelligible background speech, with additional evidence for effects on verbal working memory. Haapakangas, Hongisto, and Liebl concluded that speech intelligibility is an important predictor of cognitive disruption, not merely total sound level.
A separate Bayesian meta-analysis synthesized 65 studies of auditory distraction during reading. Background noise, speech, and music had small but reliably detrimental effects on reading performance overall, and intelligible speech and music with lyrics were among the most disruptive conditions. Vasilev, Kirkby, and Angele’s meta-analysis is directly relevant to anyone trying to read, edit, or study in a café.
This is one of the most useful corrections to the popular coffee-shop narrative. Moderate noise can support certain creative tasks while background sound can simultaneously reduce performance on language-heavy tasks. Both findings can be true because they concern different cognitive demands.
Coffee shop music can help the atmosphere without helping the task
Music adds another layer. A systematic review of 95 articles covering 154 experiments found no simple performance advantage for background music. The overall pattern suggested detrimental effects on memory and language-related tasks, with lyrics tending to be more disruptive than instrumental music; many combinations of task and music also produced no measurable effect. Cheah and colleagues’ systematic review emphasizes that task type, musical characteristics, and individual differences all matter.
In practical terms, a café playing quiet instrumental music beneath a diffuse crowd murmur is cognitively different from a café playing familiar vocal music loudly enough that you can follow every lyric. If you are choosing a café for writing or studying, speech and lyrics may matter more than whether the room feels pleasantly lively.
Social presence: why being around other people can change how work feels
Coffee shops allow a peculiar form of sociality: you can be alone without being isolated. You are visible to other people, other people are visible to you, and interaction is possible, yet sustained conversation is usually optional. This creates what many remote workers describe as a useful middle state between solitary home work and socially demanding office work.
The broad psychological literature calls one relevant family of effects social facilitation. A classic meta-analysis of 241 studies found that the presence of other people had small effects on performance: it tended to increase the speed of simple tasks but decrease the speed of complex tasks, and it could impair accuracy on complex performance. The effects accounted for only a small amount of variance in typical experiments. Bond and Titus’s meta-analysis is a useful antidote to the claim that simply seeing other workers will reliably make anyone more productive.
For café work, this means social presence is best treated as a possible motivational nudge rather than a performance guarantee. Seeing people typing, reading, or studying may make it easier to remain in “work mode,” especially for routine or well-practiced tasks. The same social field can become distracting when the work is difficult, unfamiliar, emotionally demanding, or dependent on precise language processing.
Is this the same as “body doubling”?
The popular term “body doubling” is often used for working in the presence of another person, especially in online discussions about ADHD and task initiation. A coffee shop can resemble that experience in the everyday sense that other people are present while you work. But social-facilitation research, coworking research, and informal body-doubling practices are not interchangeable evidence bases.
If you concentrate better around other people, that observation does not diagnose ADHD, and a preference for cafés is not a clinical sign. The strongest claim supported here is simpler: social presence can alter motivation, arousal, and performance, and the direction of that effect depends on the person and the task.
Working alone together: the café as a productive third place
Coffee shops are often described as “third places”: social environments outside the home and formal workplace. Modern cafés complicate the original distinction because people now bring paid work, freelance work, studying, and creative projects into them. In effect, a third place can temporarily become a workplace without becoming an office.
Research on coffee shops in urban life has documented this hybrid role. A study across five English cities described coffee shops as spaces of leisure, work, networking, connection, and community rather than merely retail sites for buying beverages. Ferreira, Ferreira, and Bos also stress that coffee shops are heterogeneous: different venues create very different social possibilities.
Public-health scholarship on third places likewise argues that locations such as cafés, libraries, parks, and salons can support informal social interaction, belonging, and community, while noting that the health evidence remains underdeveloped. Finlay and colleagues explicitly describe third-place research as important but still incomplete. That is the right evidence level for claims about coffee shops reducing isolation: plausible and supported by social-place research, but not a universal causal effect. For the dedicated evidence review of loneliness, belonging, weak ties, and active versus passive social contact in coffee shops, see Coffee Shops and Loneliness: Third Places, Belonging, and Social Connection.
Weak social contact can matter even when you do not talk much
A worker does not need to make friends with everyone in the room for a café to feel socially different from an empty apartment. Familiar baristas, brief greetings, recognizing another regular, exchanging a few words while waiting for a drink, or simply having the option of interaction can change the subjective texture of a workday.
Research on weak social ties is relevant here, with an important limitation. In daily-life studies, people reported greater happiness and belonging on days when they had more interactions with weak ties such as classmates or acquaintances. Sandstrom and Dunn found associations between peripheral social interactions and well-being. This evidence concerns actual interactions, not silent co-presence, so it should not be stretched into the claim that sitting near strangers automatically improves mental health.
Still, it helps explain why a café can be appealing to someone who wants a little social contact without scheduling a meeting. Coffee shops make low-intensity interaction available. For some remote workers, that availability is part of the benefit even if most of the session remains solitary.
Environmental separation can reduce competing cues
One reason people report being productive in cafés is that leaving home creates a clean boundary between “being at home” and “doing this piece of work.” The café does not remove distraction; it changes the distraction landscape. Domestic chores may disappear, while speech, movement, music, ordering, and phone notifications remain.
Direct café research supports the subjective side of this explanation: customer-workers frequently describe leaving home or an office because a third place enables a discrete, focused work session. The productive-third-place study found that focused work and the social dimensions of independent work were central motivations. What it cannot prove is that the same person would always score higher on an objective performance test in a café than at home.
This distinction between fewer relevant distractions and fewer total stimuli is crucial. A café may contain more sound and movement than your home while still containing fewer temptations that matter to you personally. Someone who is easily pulled into household chores may prefer the café; someone who is highly sensitive to speech may prefer a quiet room.
Repeated café use can become a work cue
A familiar coffee shop can become part of a work ritual: arrive, order, open the laptop, put on headphones, and begin. Repetition in a stable context can support habit formation by making the context itself predictive of the behavior.
A 2022 study of intentional habit building found that greater context stability was associated with stronger automaticity and goal attainment; one of its datasets experimentally varied contextual stability during study-habit formation. Stojanovic, Grund, and Fries did not study coffee shops, so the correct inference is general rather than café-specific: repeating a behavior in a stable context can help make its initiation more automatic.
This also explains why novelty is not required for café work to feel effective. Popular productivity articles often claim that a new environment helps because novelty directly boosts dopamine. That story is much more specific than the evidence warrants. A new café may feel stimulating, but a repeatedly used café may work for the opposite reason: it is familiar enough to function as a reliable context cue.
A bounded session can make work feel more concrete
Café work is naturally episodic. You travel there, order, occupy a table, work for a while, and leave. That creates a beginning and an end. At home, an unstructured workday can feel indefinitely extendable; in a café, the session is often organized around a battery charge, a meeting, a meal, a closing time, or simply the social norm that a table is not yours forever.
There is not a single coffee-shop experiment proving that bounded time improves productivity. The stronger evidence is behavioral and qualitative: people use third places to carve work into discrete sessions. The practical value may come from clearer task selection. “I am going to the café to finish this section” is a more specific behavioral episode than “I should work sometime today.”
Caffeine is a separate mechanism from the coffee shop environment
A person can work in a coffee shop while drinking decaf, tea, water, or nothing caffeinated. Conversely, a person can drink coffee at home. That is why the psychological effect of the setting should be separated from the pharmacology of caffeine.
Caffeine does have measurable acute effects on attention. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of 31 randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials in rested healthy adults found small average improvements in attention accuracy and reaction time after caffeine. Kløve and Petersen’s meta-analysis also found that dose-response patterns differed between speed and accuracy, which is another reason to avoid reducing performance to “more caffeine equals more focus.”
For the broader evidence on coffee, caffeine, concentration, dose, and individual differences, see Coffee and Focus: Does Caffeine Really Improve Concentration? The important point for the present question is that caffeine and café atmosphere can operate at the same time but should not be treated as the same cause.
Why coffee shops can help creativity but hurt deep reading
The apparent contradiction disappears when tasks are separated. Creative ideation can benefit from a modest increase in processing difficulty and abstraction under some ambient-noise conditions. Reading comprehension, verbal short-term memory, proofreading, and other language-heavy tasks are more vulnerable to meaningful background speech.
Brainstorming and idea generation
A moderately lively café can be a reasonable environment for generating possibilities, drafting loosely, mind-mapping, sketching, or exploring alternatives. The Mehta experiments provide direct evidence for creative-cognition benefits under moderate versus low ambient noise, though they do not guarantee the same effect in every real café.
Routine administrative work
Email triage, formatting, organizing files, expense entry, or other familiar work may pair well with social presence because the task is already well learned and does not demand continuous verbal working memory. Social-facilitation evidence is consistent with small benefits for simple or dominant responses, but the evidence is indirect rather than a café-specific productivity trial.
Dense reading and studying
If the task requires retaining exact verbal information, integrating several sentences, memorizing terms, or solving problems while holding intermediate steps in mind, nearby intelligible conversation can become costly. The reading meta-analysis and irrelevant-speech review both point in this direction. A quieter café corner, library, or silent room may be a better fit.
Writing and editing are not the same task
First-draft writing can contain an idea-generation component, so some writers enjoy a lively room. Editing, fact-checking, citation work, and proofreading demand more precise language processing and error monitoring. A person may therefore write productively in a café and edit the same piece more accurately somewhere quieter.
Calls, confidential work, and high-stakes decisions
A café is usually a poor setting for confidential records, sensitive client conversations, protected health information, unreleased business information, or any task in which shoulder-surfing and overheard speech create a privacy risk. This is a practical limitation of public workspaces independent of whether the environment feels cognitively helpful.
Why do some people focus better in coffee shops while others cannot?
There is no contradiction in two people having opposite reactions to the same café. Cognitive performance depends on the interaction among task demands, sound characteristics, hearing, fatigue, stress, expectations, prior habits, sensory sensitivity, and the degree to which the person can ignore or mask speech.
Even the background-music literature shows substantial dependence on task and listener characteristics rather than a universal effect. The systematic review by Cheah and colleagues found that many conditions produced no effect and that detrimental effects were especially visible in memory and language tasks. Real coffee shops add more variability than laboratory music experiments: voices, grinders, movement, lighting, smells, temperature, seating, and social contact all change together.
Preference also differs from performance. You can love a bustling café and still make more proofreading errors there. You can dislike silence while objectively remembering more in silence. The best work environment is therefore not determined by comfort alone, nor by a single laboratory result.
Does social pressure make people work harder in coffee shops?
Sometimes it may. Being visibly engaged in work around other visibly engaged people can make drifting into unrelated behavior feel less natural. Yet the evidence supports only a modest claim. Social facilitation is task-dependent, and café patrons are usually not explicitly evaluating one another.
The direct café literature instead suggests a softer form of social regulation: people share a space, recognize what others are doing, and adopt compatible patterns such as sitting with laptops, keeping possessions within a small area, and working for a bounded period. Garner’s coffee-shop study described patrons who valued collective solidarity while doing solitary activities. Mimoun and Gruen similarly documented customer-workers who used productive third places for both focus and the social dimensions of independent work.
Calling this “accountability” can be useful in everyday language, but it should not imply that strangers are monitoring your output. What matters may simply be that the visible norm of the room is compatible with work.
Is a coffee shop better than a coworking space, library, or home office?
Each environment solves a different problem. A coffee shop offers hospitality, sensory stimulation, optional social contact, and a natural session boundary, but it also offers unpredictable speech, limited privacy, variable seating, and no guarantee of power outlets or stable Wi-Fi.
A library preserves much of the “alone together” quality while usually reducing intelligible speech, which can make it better for reading, studying, and language-heavy work. A coworking space is designed for work and may provide better ergonomics, calls, meeting rooms, and professional infrastructure, while also introducing office-like conversations and networking demands. A home office offers the greatest control and privacy but requires the worker to manage domestic and digital distractions directly.
The useful question is therefore not “Which place is most productive?” but “Which place removes the main obstacle to this task?” If the obstacle is task initiation or social isolation, a café may help. If the obstacle is speech distraction, privacy, or the need to hold complex verbal information in mind, another environment may be better.
Can coffee shop sounds at home reproduce the effect?
Recorded café ambience can reproduce part of the acoustic environment, but it cannot reproduce the whole setting. It can provide a steady sound bed and mask intermittent household noise, yet it does not create physical separation from home, visible social presence, the possibility of weak social interaction, or the ritual of traveling to a third place.
The evidence also does not justify assuming that a 70 dB coffee-shop recording will universally improve focus. The famous moderate-noise result concerns creative cognition, while reading research finds small costs from background sound and larger costs from intelligible language. If you use café audio, choose it by task and treat it as an environmental preference rather than a scientifically optimized productivity dose.
For language-heavy work, unintelligible or nonverbal sound is generally a safer experiment than clear speech or lyrical music. If the sound makes you follow words, turn it down, mask it, or switch it off.
How to choose a coffee shop for focused work
Match the café to the task
Choose a lively but not overwhelming space for brainstorming or loose drafting. Choose a quieter venue for close reading, quantitative work, editing, or memorization. If the task changes during the session, the ideal environment may change too.
Pay attention to speech intelligibility, not just loudness
A table beside one animated conversation can be more distracting than a busier room with diffuse, overlapping chatter. Distance from speakers and seating orientation may matter more than a phone decibel reading.
Use headphones strategically
Noise-canceling headphones can reduce some environmental sound, but they do not guarantee perfect speech masking. For verbal tasks, adding lyrical music may replace one semantic distraction with another. Silence, quiet instrumental audio, or neutral masking sound may be more useful depending on the person.
Create a specific work target before you arrive
A café works especially well as a bounded session when you know what the session is for. Define a concrete output: outline one article, review twenty pages, answer a set of emails, clean one dataset, or draft one presentation section. The environmental change then supports a behavioral plan rather than substituting for one.
Separate caffeine decisions from workspace decisions
Do not use the productivity appeal of the café as a reason to keep increasing caffeine. The workspace can be helpful even with decaf or a non-caffeinated drink. Caffeine dose, timing, sleep, anxiety sensitivity, medication interactions, pregnancy, and other health questions require their own evidence and should not be folded into the environmental explanation.
Respect the café as a shared commercial space
A productive third place works because it is shared. Follow the venue’s rules, order appropriately for the length of your stay, avoid monopolizing scarce outlets or large tables, keep calls unobtrusive, and leave room for customers using the café for conversation and food. Work-friendly café culture depends on reciprocity between customer-workers, other patrons, and staff.
Common myths about working in coffee shops
Myth: 70 dB is the scientifically proven ideal level for focus
The 70 dB result comes from experiments on creative cognition. It is not a universal focus prescription. Language-heavy tasks can be impaired by background sound, particularly intelligible speech.
Myth: coffee shop noise always masks distractions
Some diffuse sound can mask sudden noises, but human speech can itself become the distraction. Acoustic usefulness depends on what the sound contains and what the task requires.
Myth: other people automatically make you more productive
Social-facilitation effects are small and task-dependent. The presence of others can help simple or dominant responses and can hinder complex performance. In a café, the appeal of social presence may be motivational or emotional even when it does not improve objective output.
Myth: the effect is really just caffeine
Caffeine can acutely improve some aspects of attention, but a café environment can be experienced without caffeine, and caffeine can be consumed without a café. Pharmacology and environment are separate mechanisms.
Myth: focusing better in a café means you have ADHD
No. A preference for background stimulation, social presence, or working outside the home is not a diagnostic test for ADHD or any other condition. Many people with and without ADHD prefer cafés, and many people with ADHD find café noise distracting.
Myth: novelty is the whole explanation
A new environment may feel stimulating, but repeated use of the same café can also become effective because stable context supports habit and task initiation. The evidence does not support reducing the entire experience to a novelty-dopamine slogan.
What the evidence is strongest about
Established evidence: ambient sound affects cognition in task-specific ways. Moderate ambient noise improved creative performance in the Mehta experiments, while meta-analytic and review evidence shows that background speech and other sounds can impair reading, verbal short-term memory, and related tasks. Social facilitation is a real but generally small and task-dependent phenomenon. Acute caffeine can modestly improve attention in healthy rested adults.
Good direct but mainly qualitative evidence: people intentionally use coffee shops and other third places for focused work, separation from home or office, and the social experience of working around others. These studies help explain motivation and practice but do not provide a universal causal estimate of productivity gains.
Plausible interpretation: a repeated café can become a contextual work cue; a bounded trip can help define a work episode; low-intensity social contact can make remote work feel less isolated. These interpretations are consistent with broader habit and social-psychology research, but the exact magnitude of a “coffee shop effect” has not been established in a single unified experimental literature.
Unsupported overclaim: that everyone has an optimal 70 dB focus level, that coffee-shop background speech always improves concentration, that seeing other people guarantees accountability, or that a preference for café work reveals a diagnosis or personality type.
A practical decision rule
Use a coffee shop when it solves a specific environmental problem. If home makes starting difficult, a café can create separation and a clear work ritual. If silence feels under-stimulating during brainstorming, moderate ambient activity may be useful. If remote work feels socially empty, being around other people can make the session feel more connected.
Choose another setting when the task is dominated by exact reading, verbal memory, confidential material, sensitive calls, or complex work that collapses whenever speech captures your attention. A library, private room, or controlled home office may outperform a café for those tasks.
The strongest strategy is task-environment matching. Instead of asking whether coffee shops are objectively productive, ask what cognitive demand you are trying to support and what kind of distraction is most costly to you.
FAQ
Why can I focus better in a coffee shop than at home?
A café may give you a clearer work boundary, fewer personally relevant household cues, a repeatable work ritual, moderate sensory stimulation, and the presence of other people. Direct café studies show that people deliberately use third places for focused work and social atmosphere. Whether your objective performance is actually better depends on the task and the café.
Does coffee shop noise improve productivity?
Not in a general, universal sense. Moderate ambient noise improved creative performance in a well-known series of experiments, but background speech and noise can reduce reading and verbal-memory performance. “Productivity” contains many different tasks, so the direction of the effect depends on what you are doing.
What noise level is best for working in a café?
There is no universal best level. The widely cited 70 dB figure comes from creative-cognition experiments, not a universal productivity standard. Speech intelligibility and task type matter at least as much as total sound level.
Why do I like being around strangers while I work?
The presence of other people can provide low-intensity social stimulation without requiring conversation. Direct café research describes people working alone together, while broader social-facilitation research shows that social presence can alter performance and arousal. The effect is usually small and task-dependent.
Are coffee shops good places to study?
They can be good for planning, brainstorming, discussion, and some routine study tasks. They can be poor for dense reading, memorization, or tasks that rely heavily on verbal working memory when nearby speech is intelligible. Match the café and seat to the study task.
Does caffeine explain why I work better in a coffee shop?
Caffeine may contribute if you consume it, because controlled trials show small acute improvements in attention. It does not explain the whole café effect. Environmental separation, ambient sound, social presence, ritual, and context cues can exist without caffeine.
Is working in a coffee shop a form of body doubling?
It can resemble body doubling in the everyday sense of doing a task while other people are present. The scientific evidence discussed here comes from social facilitation, third-place research, environmental psychology, and café studies; it should not be treated as direct proof for every claim made about body doubling.
Can working in coffee shops reduce loneliness?
Coffee shops can provide access to weak social interactions, familiar regulars, and a sense of being around other people, and third-place research links such environments to social connection and belonging. Evidence that cafés directly reduce loneliness for everyone is still limited. Actual interaction, accessibility, cost, culture, and individual preference all matter.
Is a busy café better for creativity than a quiet room?
Sometimes. The Mehta experiments found better creative-task performance under moderate than low ambient noise, with worse performance at high noise. That result is credible evidence for a particular kind of creativity effect, not proof that every busy café is better than every quiet room.
Can I recreate the coffee shop effect with café sounds?
You can recreate part of the acoustic environment, and some people find that useful. You cannot reproduce the physical separation, social presence, weak interactions, service ritual, or public-space norms of an actual café. For verbal work, avoid assuming that louder or more speech-like sound is better.
A café environment can support concentration for some people without proving that coffee itself raises output. For the separate evidence on coffee, caffeine, routines, and work performance, see Coffee and Productivity: Alertness, Routine, Expectation, and Performance Limits.
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References
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