Fair Weather Friends

Does warm weather make us copy other people more?

If you’re reading this in the Northern Hemisphere, then Summer is on its way. It may not feel like it right this second – it certainly doesn’t here in London – but it’ll get here eventually. And in the Summer, behaviour changes.

OK, that’s not a startling revelation. Marketers, like everybody else, are well aware people do different things in Summer. Why do they behave differently? Because it’s hotter. We’re two-for-two on stating the obvious, here. But some things aren’t quite as predictable as buying more ice cream or taking holidays.

For example, on warm days, gamblers betting at a Hong Kong racecourse were more likely to back the favourite. That was the conclusion of a study (PDF) by Xun (Irene) Huang and her team from Sun Yat-sen University and the CHUK Business School, published last year in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Huang looked at three years’ worth of betting data and racing records to uncover this result – that bets converged on the favourite when temperatures were high.

What lay behind this? Huang’s study also ran experiments simulating predictions on the stock market, and choices in consumer goods. Some participants made their predictions or choices in warm rooms, some in colder rooms. In each case, some participants were given information on what predictions or choices others had made. And the likelihood of participants conforming – i.e. deciding in line with the majority – went up when the rooms were warm.

So what linked these experiments – the racecourse and the laboratory – was conformity. Huang showed that when temperatures go up, people rely on others’ opinions more. Humans are naturally copying animals – but particularly when it’s hot.

This has plenty of implications – for when marketers should use social proof in ad campaigns, for instance, or for how supermarkets arrange their shelves in warmer weather.

The effect of ambient temperature on decisions falls under the category of studies in embodied cognition – a fascinating and fashionable area of psychological research. Embodied cognition recognises that we process information – and make decisions – using our bodies as well as our brains.

Temperature-related choices are a crucial part of this – warmth not only influences copying, but also raises purchase intent. We saw this at BrainJuicer when running our “visceral shopper” experiments a few years ago – purchase intent of food fluctuated dramatically according to mood, hunger and temperature.

But it’s not just food – another recently published study (also in the JCP, by Yonat Zwebner, Jacob Goldenberg and Leonard Lee) looks at the “temperature premium” in more detail, and finds that consumers are willing to pay more when they had held a warm therapeutic pad first than when they’d held a cold one – not just for cakes, but for batteries too.

The “fair weather friends” copying effect, and Zwebner’s “temperature premium” are more examples of just how complex unconscious human decision-making is. This is more bad news for the direct-questions model of research – sure, people will cite the hot weather for food sales, but for batteries? For people working in the behaviour change field, though, it’s inspiring and thought-provoking work.

Thanks to Alain Samson for help researching this post. To find out more about our Behaviour Change Unit, just ask!