When Feeling "Hot" Stops You From Feeling Cold

Source: Ibuki Tsubo (via Unsplash)

"A hoe never gets cold," as Cardi B says.

Although not a formal scientific theory, the "Cardi B maxim" asserts that women may not feel the cold when out on the town if they're looking attractive and in minimal levels of clothing. These ideas were tested in a recent paper published in the high-impact British Journal of Social Psychology, which was lead-authored by Ph.D. student Roxanne Felig.

Specifically, the researchers investigated how cold women felt when wearing different levels of clothing, and whether any effect of "clothes coverage" was driven by self-objectification.

A major strength of the work was its naturalistic approach. Instead of the usual dry social-psychological approach of asking people to rate agreement levels or give judgments on self-report questionnaires, the researchers got out into the street to test people "in the wild."

In a busy area of an American city known for its nightlife, they managed to recruit 185 women to take part in their study. Participation entailed women posing for photographs of their outfits, and completing measures of both self-objectification (i.e., the importance they placed on their own physical appearance) and their current warmth.

The researchers also logged the actual temperature at the time of data collection, and asked participants about their alcohol intake during the night. These latter variables were controlled for in the data analysis because they could affect how warm or cold participants felt.

The results were interesting, and supported the hypothesis that women who self-objectify are less prone to "feeling the cold." That is, there was no relationship between "feeling cold" and the amount of clothing being warm by those participants who reported self-objectifying to a higher degree. However, those who did not self-objectify felt colder when they were wearing less covering clothes, and warmer when they were showing less skin.

In other words, feeling like you looked "hot" appeared to stop the women from feeling cold, even when they were exposing comparatively more skin.

Felig and her team genuinely started with Cardi B's maxim in mind. Promoting the survey, she (Felig) said:

We wanted to test that scientifically... and so we did, and it is true.

However, the veracity of the result has been called into doubt in what some have called aggressive misogynistic campaigns on social media.

Specifically, some open science advocates have re-analyzed the data in many possible ways (making themselves susceptible to accusations of p-hacking in return) to highlight how the significant results reported in the paper can only be found when data and participants are excluded exactly how Felig and her team undertook this process. Further, the key tests of the hypothesis being tested return p-values that only just meet the threshold for statistical significance even under these very specific conditions. This caveat calls into question whether the data were selectively reported, even though the authors' original data exclusions were very defensible.

Pre-registration is a good solution for this. Had data exclusions been agreed upon and registered in advance, accusations of such selective reporting can be eliminated. As such, the ongoing debates surrounding these data invite replications to be run with analysis plans being pre-registered ahead of time.

Nonetheless, for now, the Cardi B maxim is officially in the literature, with some supporting evidence.