What California and the South Share: Warmth

By Gregg Miller
June 18, 2010


As a culture (or perhaps just a cold New England culture) we’ve developed stereotypes about some of the warmer states like sunny California (72 and sunny!) or the renowned hospitality of the genteel Southern states. There might be a scientific explanation for this kind of thinking.
Research on interpersonal impression shows that warmth in particular can exert considerable power on how we judge people. When given a hot cup of coffee to hold by a stranger in an elevator for just a few moments, people rated this stranger’s personality more warmly. The opposite was true, too: if given a cup of ice coffee in identical circumstances, participants in the experiment rated the personality of the stranger as being colder. Another experiment was conducted directly afterward to see whether such temperature differences could affect how individuals behave and not only how they form impressions. Participants in the second study were told that as compensation for their efforts they would be able to choose between a small gift that they could keep for themselves or give to a friend. 75% of the people who held a cold Icy-Hot pack before choosing decided to keep the reward for themselves, whereas only 46% of individuals given a hot Icy-Hot pack prior to their decision chose to do so.
Remember, this is all happening subconsciously. We are prone to think we are in control of our actions and that how we make our decisions are based on concrete and rational sources. Like many other studies, this research shows how the subconscious is always working just as hard, if not harder than, our conscious control to shape how we interact with our world.
The authors of the study, Lawrence Williams and John Bargh, suggest that this ability to make judgments about people on the basis of differences in temperature served as an adaptive short-cut which allowed us to determine whether someone could be trusted, or at least recognized as someone who was not our enemy. This instinctual preference for interpersonal warmth — a judgment that clearly goes beyond our physical perception to influence our interpersonal evaluations — is theorized to come from our early infancy and the warmth we felt from the physical contact with our parents.
If this were to be the case, then that piece of genetic code that associates trust and interpersonal warmth with higher temperatures is still in our brains today. Although plenty of other factors are certainly at play, it’s reasonable to guess that physical warmth has something to do with Californian happiness and Southern Hospitality. After all, we didn’t develop those cultural stereotypes about people living in North Dakota, did we? And stereotypes don’t form over night. Generations and generations of people living in warm environments could very well form cultures more conducive to happy, trusting individuals.
So think about it. Next time you’re trying to figure out the best “first date” option, forget that ice-cold beer in a bar or the romantic comedy in the perfectly air-conditioned movie theater and opt instead for sharing a hot beverage.

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