Do colder and hotter climates make richer societies more, but poorer societies less, happy and altruistic?

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Abstract

Physiological needs for thermal comfort, nutritional comfort, and healthiness make colder and hotter climates more demanding than more temperate climates. Affluence may help to meet those thermal demands. Two country-level studies indeed show that thermal demands (colder and hotter climates) and wealth-related resources (higher income per capita) are joint roots of happiness (N=55) and altruism (N=71). In colder climates richer societies are more but poorer societies are less happy and altruistic. In hotter climates richer societies are happier but poorer societies are unhappier. In both colder and hotter climates richer societies tend to be happier at the expense of being more altruistic whereas poorer societies tend to be more altruistic at the expense of being happier. The findings generate a demands–resources theory on self- and other-directed consequences of thermoclimate.

Introduction

Dotted around the globe are many examples of monuments, abandoned cities, and depressed settlements which appear to provide stark evidence of the part excessively cold and hot climates can play in human life (Burroughs, 1997). In addition to extreme thermoclimate—the generalized cold or hot weather of an area—day-to-day cold and heat also play a major role (Maunder, 1986). Indeed, cold and hot atmospheric environments have a variety of effects on humans, including sociological effects (e.g. migration, fertility, mortality), psychological effects (e.g. aggression, stress, mental illness), and physiological effects (e.g. allergy, physical comfort, metabolism). An overview of the extant literature lists 830 sociological studies, 458 psychological studies, and 807 physiological studies concerning climatic effects on human functioning (Parker, 1995).

A surprising observation is that only 3% of these thermoclimatic studies address typical social-psychological issues (n=61) such as the impact of ambient temperature on social behaviors in general (n=53) and on aggressive behaviors in particular (n=29). So far, the rare social-psychological thought for effects of thermoclimate tends to highlight unpleasant consequences including negative affect, aggression, and crime (e.g. Anderson, 1989; Anderson, Anderson, Dorr, DeNeve, & Flanagan, 2000; Rotton, 1986; Rotton & Cohn, 2002; Van de Vliert, Schwartz, Huismans, Hofstede, & Daan, 1999), and more neutral consequences such as emotional expressiveness (Pennebaker, Rimé, & Blankenship, 1996). Only very rarely attention has been paid to the opposite, the possible climatic roots of pleasant and positive states, notably happiness (Parker, 2000), helping (Schneider, Lesko, & Garrett, 1980), or both (Cunningham, 1979). Additionally, the exceptional studies of pleasant and positive states searched for linear instead of curvilinear thermoclimatic effects. By contrast, in this article we examine how cold, temperate, and hot climates curvilinearly affect the level of happiness or subjective well-being, and the adoption and endorsement of altruism, seeking to improve the happiness or subjective well-being of others.

Studies of cross-society links between thermoclimate and such psychological states as the evaluation of one's own happiness and the altruistic motivation to help others are desirable for both empirical and theoretical reasons. Solar climate, measured as absolute latitude squared (to account for the earth's curvature) generally accounts for 20–50% of the variation in collective human behavior (Parker (1997), Parker (2000)). Relatedly, between societies, there are large differences in happiness (e.g. Diener, Diener, & Diener, 1995; Inglehart & Klingemann, 2000), in helping behavior (Levine, Norenzayan, & Philbrick, 2001), and in altruistic motivation (Van de Vliert, Huang, & Levine, in press). As it is not beyond the realm of possibility that those societal differences in feeling good and wanting to do good are caused by thermoclimate, those differences might be falsely attributed to other contextual conditions. Cross-national differences in happiness, for example, have been attributed to differences in cultural individualism (Diener et al., 1995), socio-economic development (Inglehart & Klingemann, 2000), and political freedom in high-income societies but economic freedom in low-income societies (Veenhoven, 2000), without taking thermoclimate into account. Finally, we trust that society-level links between atmospheric temperature and happiness and altruism, if any, can be used as innovative inputs to examine isomorphic individual-level links between ambient temperature and feeling good or wanting to do good. For example, if people are especially happy and helpful in countries with both a cold climate and a high income per capita, this finding could prompt the isomorphic individual-level hypothesis that cold temperatures in conjunction with the possession of financial resources to take protective measures elicits satisfaction and the motivation to produce satisfaction for others.

This article starts with overviews of the differential occurrence of self-directed happiness and other-directed altruism across countries, and of thermal demands and wealth-related resources as antecedent conditions of the residents’ happiness and altruism. Two country-level studies are then reported which operationalize climatic demands in terms of deviations from temperatures in temperate climates, and wealth-related resources in terms of national wealth as the main provider of means to cope with the hardships of cold or hot climates. These studies share our overall expectation that greater thermal demands evoke either more or less positive states—happiness and altruism—depending on the extent to which a country's inhabitants have wealth-related resources at their disposal to meet those thermal demands.

Section snippets

Happiness in nations

Happiness or subjective well-being, the more or less satisfactory outcome of people's cognitive and affective evaluations of their own lives, is much higher on average across individuals in some countries than in others (Diener et al., 1995; Inglehart, Basañez, & Moreno, 1998; Veenhoven (1991), Veenhoven (1993), Veenhoven (2000)). For example, the inhabitants of Australia, Canada, and Sweden are among the happiest, whereas the inhabitants of Cameroon, Russia, and Panama are among the unhappiest

Overview of the studies

The main difference between the studies to be reported is that they attempt to predict and explain self-directed happiness (Study 1) and other-directed altruism (Study 2). Apart from that, the two studies have much in common. They are country-level studies that view and employ the interactive combinations of thermoclimate and national wealth as antecedent conditions of feeling good (happiness) and wanting to do good (altruism). In each study, the dependent variable is a composite index in which

Sample of nations

We included all 55 countries (see Table 3; Yugoslavia was included in Study 1, Serbia in Study 2) whose residents’ level of happiness has been estimated and indexed by Diener et al. (1995). Although this sample is certainly not representative with respect to all countries, it seems to represent a relevant range of variations in the predictor variables of climate and wealth (e.g. cold/high-income Canada, Iceland, and Finland; cold/low-income East Germany, Poland, and Russia;

Sample of nations

We included 71 countries (see Table 3) whose residents’ degree of altruism could be derived from three prior studies discussed in the next paragraph. As in Study 1, this convenience sample seems to represent a relevant range of variations in climate and wealth (e.g. cold/high-income Canada, Iceland, and Norway; cold/low-income Belarus, Estonia, and Poland; temperate/high-income Greece, Hong Kong, and Venezuela; temperate/low-income Ethiopia, Iraq, and Peru; hot/high-income United Arab Emirates

General discussion

Our research results can be connected with the classic work of Montesquieu (1748/1989) who was the first to study cross-national relations among thermoclimate, national wealth, and subjective well-being. The key breakthrough made by Montesquieu is the thought that income is not generated for income's sake. Rather, income is generated by humans who are driven to consume (today and in anticipation of the future). Much consumption, in turn, is directly or indirectly driven by climate-contingent

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Shalom Schwartz for access to additional data, and we thank Onne Janssen, Grant Savage, Ruut Veenhoven, Gerben Van der Vegt, Nico Van Yperen, and three anonymous JEP-reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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