According to new research, people exposed to warmer temperatures find it harder to grasp viewpoints other than their own, while those exposed to colder ones find it easier: to take the heat out of a disagreement, it seems, you should literally take the heat out of the room. Since I've always preferred the cold, – I'm already sick of people hoping this summer will be a hot one – this was music (or air conditioning?) to my ears. It's tempting to extrapolate: might this explain the affable tolerance of Canadians, say, or the history of prejudice in the US south? Sadly, on closer reading, the study is only a partial victory for cold. We're better at seeing other perspectives when we're chilly, the researchers argue, because cold triggers a sense of social distance. It reminds us of our separateness, and thus the fact that others aren't like us. We gain perspective at the cost of intimacy.
So what looks, at first, like a surprising result turns out to reinforce one of the most intriguing psychological findings of recent years: that coldness makes people feel lonely. The opposite's also true: loneliness makes people feel cold. In one experiment, students played a computer game in which they threw a ball back and forth with other on-screen characters, each of whom they (wrongly) believed was controlled by another student, playing elsewhere. After a while, the others sometimes began to keep the ball to themselves. Subsequently, players who'd been thus ostracised showed a marked preference for hot foods over cold ones; non-ostracised players didn't. In a recent rerun of the experiment, ostracism led to a drop in skin temperature. Other studies have found that hot baths relieve loneliness, and that merely being reminded of an experience of exclusion prompts people to judge a room's temperature as colder.
This kind of research – about how seemingly innocuous aspects of our surroundings can exert powerful effects – has been in the doghouse lately; several classic findings have proved difficult to replicate. It's no longer clear, for example, whether being exposed to words associated with old age ("grey", "bingo") really does make people start walking more slowly. But there's reason to believe the link between loneliness and temperature will hold up. It's no mere matter of word association: temperature may be a crucial way our bodies keep track of whether we're getting the social contact we need. It's easy to see why natural selection might have given us a yearning to be near friendly fellow tribe members: they were crucial for food, security and sex. People worry that social media are making us lonely and isolated, but what if that is exactly half-true? What if they are not making us isolated – online connections are real, after all – but are making us feel lonely, partly because those connections don't involve heat?
It sounds silly that hot baths and soup might be the answer to loneliness, just as it sounded silly, in April, to learn that paracetamol might alleviate existential angst. Surely the only real answer to loneliness is real connection? But feeling isolated makes people try less hard to connect. So a nudge in the right direction – even a bath – can't hurt. (And severe loneliness really can hurt, physically: it's been found to exacerbate numerous serious diseases.) But I'm a cold-lover. Does that mean I hate people? I hope not. When I really think about it, the thing I love most about cold weather is coming back into the warmth.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
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