News
Body Temperature Is A Social Factor
A new study supports the idea that our temperature affects our social judgements.
From our earliest moments, our awareness of being physically close to someone else is tied up with perceptions of actual warmth. It’s been suggested that this relationship becomes deeply ingrained, with temperature in turn affecting our social perceptions on into adulthood.
Adam Fay at the State University of New York and Jon Maner at Florida State University ran their experiment taking into account the ambient temperature, and modifying the body temperature of the participants with the help of a heated back wrap.
After the battery-powered wrap was strapped around a participant’s waist, they were asked about the pleasantness of the product, but then also how likely they were, over the next week, to engage in various social behaviours, such as catching up with an old friend or making a phone call to someone they cared about.
For some of the participants, the strap wasn’t turned on. For others, it was, and it produced a mild heat.
Asking people how likely they think they are to do something in the future isn’t a great way to explore actual future behaviour. But the researchers just wanted to know whether there was an interplay between the ambient temperature and the heat or absence of heat from the back wrap on the participants’ answers — and there was.
Apparently, feeling cold physically is also perceived as feeling “colder” socially, driving a desire for more contact with other people.
The new findings “suggest that seemingly subtle changes in temperature can have important implications for the psychology of social affiliation, and such findings apply in real-world contexts outside the laboratory,” the researchers write.
From our earliest moments, our awareness of being physically close to someone else is tied up with perceptions of actual warmth. It’s been suggested that this relationship becomes deeply ingrained, with temperature in turn affecting our social perceptions on into adulthood.
Adam Fay at the State University of New York and Jon Maner at Florida State University ran their experiment taking into account the ambient temperature, and modifying the body temperature of the participants with the help of a heated back wrap.
After the battery-powered wrap was strapped around a participant’s waist, they were asked about the pleasantness of the product, but then also how likely they were, over the next week, to engage in various social behaviours, such as catching up with an old friend or making a phone call to someone they cared about.
For some of the participants, the strap wasn’t turned on. For others, it was, and it produced a mild heat.
Asking people how likely they think they are to do something in the future isn’t a great way to explore actual future behaviour. But the researchers just wanted to know whether there was an interplay between the ambient temperature and the heat or absence of heat from the back wrap on the participants’ answers — and there was.
Apparently, feeling cold physically is also perceived as feeling “colder” socially, driving a desire for more contact with other people.
The new findings “suggest that seemingly subtle changes in temperature can have important implications for the psychology of social affiliation, and such findings apply in real-world contexts outside the laboratory,” the researchers write.