On the other hand, the author apparently also found a relationship with the lunar phases, so I’m not sure what to make of this study, which anyway I haven’t been able to read beyond the abstract because I couldn’t access the paper, even through Sci-Hub. Our intuitions are already somewhat confirmed: people were more likely to help and give tips when there was more sunshine, and also the waitresses’ mood changed with sunshine and temperature. The “quasi experiments” involved asking people to help an interviewer, or looking at whether they gave tip to a waitress, and studying the relationship with the weather at the time. Our tour of the literature begins in 1979 with a paper titled “Weather, mood, and helping behavior: Quasi experiments with the sunshine samaritan” ( Cunningham 1979 ). With these messy caveats in mind, what does the scientific research say? “Are people in a better mood on a humid day” is very different from “Are people more satisfied with their life when they live in countries where the temperature never dips below freezing?” We could mix and match any of the above factors. We already see that our research question cannot be straightforward. After all, 14☌ (57☏) is the average temperature of the Earth, which doesn’t say much on how people experience temperature in their lives. Two places could have an average temperature of 14☌, but one could be fairly close to the average throughout the year, while the other experiences huge differences between (or even within) seasons. a sunny region may also be warm, but not always.Īdditionally, the patterns of each of these variables can differ over time. Often these things cluster together, e.g. That seems to be the same kind of error that climate change skeptics make when they doubt global warming based on a single cold day, or that climate change activists make when they ring the alarm based on a single extreme weather event.Īnother thing to note is that “weather” and “climate” both have many dimensions: sunniness and cloud cover, temperature, amount and type of precipitation (rain, snow, whatever “wintry mix” is supposed to be), wind, humidity, etc. In other words, I’d be wary of people concluding that because they’re in a good mood on a sunny day, that means that sunny weather all year long will definitely make them more satisfied with their life. It seems pretty clear to me that:ĭaily mood is distinct from (though probably related to) long-term life satisfactionĭaily weather is distinct from (though definitely related to) long-term climate The first thing I would say is that it’s important to distinguish the short and the long term, for both happiness and weather. Accepting that happiness is multifactorial and tricky to measure, that people have different tastes, and that your (and my) personal experience provides anecdotal evidence that sunshine is nice, what can we say about the weather-happiness relationship? ![]() “Sunlight puts me in a good mood, so obviously it boosts happiness.”Īll of these are valid points, but they’re kind of sterile. ![]() People react differently to the weather, so nothing meaningful can ever be said about its relationship to happiness. Happiness is really hard to measure and nothing meaningful can ever be said about it. the Scandinavian countries are happy thanks to welfare programs or whatever, despite their bad weather. What’s up?įirst, let’s get the obvious and boring hypotheses out of the way, so we can focus on more interesting stuff. At the same time, the happiest countries are usually the northernmost ones, and in practice people don’t migrate in huge numbers to the tropics. ![]() And it’s reasonably common for people to actually move to such places and say that their quality of life has increased. It’s very common for people to go for vacations in sunny and warm places. It’s extremely common for people to yearn for sunnier or warmer places.
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