Boiling rage and warm hearts: Or, how does temperature affect prosocial behaviour?

Temperature is an ever-present feature of the environment, and while we know that climate change is leading to all manner of physical changes to the planet (melting ice-caps, desertification, greater weather volatility), we are still unsure how temperature experience might affect people's behaviour. On the one hand, some studies have shown that experience of higher temperatures is linked

with more positive and prosocial behaviours (e.g., greater gift giving, altruism), while on the other hand, some have shown that higher temperatures are associated with more negative, antisocial behaviours, like violence and aggression.

As an example of more positive outcomes, a 2008 study by Lawrence Williams and John Bargh found that brief exposure to warm objects, like a cup of hot coffee or a warm therapeutic gel pack, lead people to view others in a more positive light, or be more likely to behave prosocially, such as choosing to give a gift to a friend.  In contrast to this pattern, a study by Richard Larrick and colleagues looking at player behaviour in over 11,000 baseball games found that as temperatures increased, so too did the likelihood of pitchers deliberately throwing the ball at the batter or making other retaliatory actions.  In other words, higher temperatures lead to more aggressive play. So, it has been unclear whether experiences of higher temperatures, be they brief exposures to objects or longer exposure to particular ambient temperatures, are consistently associated with more or less prosocial behaviour. 

In the current study¹we investigated this question by looking at whether higher temperatures are associated with more or less prosocial responding, while also looking at whether brief interactions with hot/cold objects affected people's choices.  At different ambient temperatures, participants took part in a "product evaluation" study of hot or cold therapeutic gel packs.  At the end of the study, each participant could choose between taking a reward for themselves (the self-interested option) or giving the reward to someone else (the prosocial option). While the pack temperatures did not influence the choices people made, we found a weak relationship between the ambient temperature at the time of the study and whether the participant responded prosocially or not; as temperatures increased, participants were more likely to choose the prosocial option (see the graph).

Graph showing the relationship between temperature and prosocial choice. 

However, subsequent analysis suggested that this pattern existed for only one of the two groups of participants we tested (one in the UK, but not in the US), and so we feel this finding should be taken with a pinch of salt, rather than as clear evidence of a link between the environmental temperature and people's prosocial behaviour².  However, if temperature change does have the capacity to influence human behaviour, it is certainly an issue that merits further research! 

Footnotes

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1 This data was originally collected as part of a pre-registered replication of the Williams & Bargh (2008) study (Lynott et al., 2014). However, in the 2014 paper we only examined pack temperature, but not ambient temperature. ^↩

2 The Bayes Factors for the combined data (both study sites together) indicated support for the effect of ambient temperature, whereas Bayes Factors for the two separate study sites were either inconclusive, or supported the null model (i.e., were not consistent with temperature affecting prosocial choice). ^↩

 

References

Larrick, R. P., Timmerman, T. A., Carton, A. M., & Abrevaya, J. (2011). Temper, temperature, and temptation: Heat-related retaliation in baseball. Psychological Science, 22(4), 423-428.

Lynott, D., Corker, K. S., Connell, L., & O'Brien, K. S. (2017). The effect of haptic and ambient temperature experience on prosocial behavior. Archives of Scientific Psychology, 5(1), 10.

Lynott, D., Corker, K. S., Wortman, J., Connell, L., Donnellan, M. B., Lucas, R. E., & O’Brien, K. (2014). Replication of “Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth” by Williams and Bargh (2008). Social Psychology.

Williams, L. E., & Bargh, J. A. (2008). Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth. Science, 322(5901), 606-607.

Meta-analysis Help Needed: Effects of temperature on prosocial and antisocial behaviour

We are currently conducting a meta-analysis looking at the influence of temperature on prosocial and antisocial behaviour.  If you have anything that fits this description (details below) I would be grateful if you could email me (d.lynott@lancaster.ac.uk) or Katie Corker (corkerk@kenyon.edu).  We have already done an extensive literature trawl, so we are mainly looking for unpublished work in this area - this could be work from many years ago, work that is under review/in press or data that has been collected and analysed but not formally written up yet. 

The Specifics

We are specifically interested in experimental (or quasi-experimental studies) that manipulate either ambient temperature (e.g., hot vs cold conditions; across a range of temperatures) or temperature primes (e.g., hot/cold packs, hot/cold drinks, hot/cold seat pads), where the behaviour of interest could be classified as prosocial or antisocial.  An example of prosocial behaviour is Williams & Bargh (2008, Study 2), where participants chose between selecting a gift for themselves (self-interested) or a friend (prosocial). See also Ijzerman et al (2013), where children donate stickers to another child.  And example of anti-social behaviour might be where participants have the opportunity to punish another participant or target individual. For example, Fay and Maner (2014) had participants direct noise blasts at partners. 

If you believe your study meets these criteria, we are requesting details of your study, including the study design, sample sizes per condition, means and standard deviations per condition.  Alternatively, if you are happy to provide us with the raw data and information on the coding of variables, we can extract the required data. 

Note: We will only use the data for the purpose of the meta-analysis and we will delete the data afterwards. 

If you have any questions about this study, please do not hesitate to get in touch.  Thank you in advance for your help and any work you might contribute. 

Best wishes, 

Dermot Lynott, Katie Corker, Louise Connell, Kerry O’Brien.