Research has found that warm temperatures make people more likely to “warm up” to others and cooperate. Now research has shown the inverse to be true: cold temperatures make people more “cold-hearted” and less empathetic.
A team of Japanese researchers has discovered that physical coldness promotes utilitarian moral judgments by reducing empathic concerns and emotional aversion to sacrificing innocent people for the greater good. The study was published October 2 in the scientific journal Frontiers in Psychology.
“It is important to be aware that our moral judgment and empathic feelings are affected by temperature perception,” Hiroko Nakamura and his colleagues wrote in their study, noting that previous research had found that ambient temperature influenced the judgment of criminals.
“Our present experiments reveal that embodiment actually affects moral dilemma judgment, and the results imply that temperature perception underlie social relationships and morality,” they said.
In the study, 88 Japanese undergraduate students were told they were participating in a evaluation of a commercial product. The students were asked to wear a scarf that either contained frozen internal water packs or internal water packs at room temperature.
After answering questions about the scarf, the researchers asked the students to join another study, while still wearing the scarf. In this second study, the participants responded to various moral dilemma scenarios.
Nakamura and his colleagues found that participants who wore the scarf with frozen water packs were more likely to endorse utilitarian judgments in the scenarios, meaning they sought to produce the best overall outcome — even if that meant sacrificing one to help many.
“Intimate social relationships such as communal sharing relationships are scaffolded onto physical experiences like touching others and sensing others’ temperature, and thus temperature perception may cue communal sharing relationships and unity moral motives, which directs to take care in-group member and activate empathy and compassion,” the researchers wrote.
“Present experiments support these views: coldness decreased empathic feeling and increase utilitarian moral decisions. Thus, temperature perception or physical contact may activate concepts of close relationship with others, and directed moral emotions and judgments.”