Warm Rooms for Warm Friends

Image by BodogGirl via Flickr

Want to form tighter social bonds between people? A group you’re trying to have get to know each other? Strangers on a train? The girl you’ve brought home and… you?

Try turning up the heat. Literally.

A little while back, we discussed the idea of “embodied cognition” — the idea that the way we think about the world is grounded in, and affected by, physical metaphors. In particular, we discussed a study showing that people take the concept of something being “heavy” or “weighty” (in the sense of being important) quite literally. It’s also been found that literally “taking a step back,” can improve cognitive control on measures such as the Stroop task. Immoral thoughts can make us want to clean. Thinking about cleanliness can soften our moral judgments. Being left out socially can leave us, literally, cold.

Well, a new study (abstract; PDF) in this line of research tells us that by making people physically warm, you can make them feel emotionally warm toward their fellow man, as well. Here’s the write-up from BPS Research Digest:

Fifty-two participants were shown an animated film featuring chess pieces. Crucially, half the participants were seated in a cool room (15 to 18 degrees Celsius) whereas the others sat in a warm room (22 to 24 degrees Celsius). Afterwards participants in the warm room used more concrete, physical language to describe the film and reported feeling socially closer to the experimenter than did the participants in a cold room.

Another experiment looked at the effect of room temperature on the way participants perceived similarities between arrays of shapes – particularly whether they would focus on the way the shapes were arranged in relation to each other, as opposed to focusing on their actual shape. This time, participants in a warm room were more likely to recognise the “relational similarity” between objects. For example, when presented with three triangles arranged in a triangular formation, participants in a warm room were more likely to say this arrangement was similar to an array of squares arranged in a triangular formation, rather than to a square formation of triangles.

Got that? Warmth seems to make us feel socially closer to each other, and it makes us think about the relationships between things as opposed to their individual nature.

Of course, this leaves something of a chicken-and-egg problem: Do we associate warmth and social closeness because that metaphor is so deeply ingrained in us? Or does that metaphor exist because of a natural connection between the two concepts?

Either way, one key to warm relations is keeping warm.