Can You Stay Cool When Making Risky Decisions?

Have you ever wondered why so many of the metaphors we use in daily life revolve around temperature? We seek warm-hearted friends who give us a warm reception, instead of showing us the cold shoulder or cool stares. When it comes to our relationships with other people, we use warmth metaphors to signal closeness, familiarity, and trust. However, when making choices, we try to keep a cool head to avoid heat-of-the-moment decisions that we might come to regret. Here, being cool is more desirable because it signals a rational mind.

Ambient temperature is not accidentally such an integral part of our metaphorical vocabulary and is ubiquitous in our daily experience. As consumers, we might move from different temperature zones in short amounts of time, such as from our cars to the street inside a freezing grocery store or a much cozier clothing shop. Although temperature is such an important physical force, marketers have only recently begun to wonder whether temperature can also have psychological effects and thereby influence consumer behavior.

Research on the psychological effects of temperature is surprisingly new and has often focused on the social aspects of consumer behavior. For example, I’ve found in my own work that ambient warmth (e.g., being in a warm room) makes people feel closer and more similar to other people (Steinmetz & Mussweiler, 2011), whereas ambient cold reduces trust in other consumers (Kang et al., 2010).

New research by Lundberg and colleagues now examines whether temperature can affect consumer decisions over and above relations to other consumers. Going back to the old metaphor about keeping a cool head, these authors find that consumers take fewer risks in colder temperatures, but make riskier decisions in warmer temperatures. For example, on warmer days, consumers were more open to buying riskier products in the supermarket than on colder days. What are risky products here? One example would be a new snack bar that you haven’t tried yet, and that could be great or terrible. By buying it, you would risk not liking it and having to throw it away. In contrast, a non-risky product would be something like sugar or flour, where it’s pretty clear what the product is like.

The authors found that on warmer days and in warmer rooms, consumers felt in general more activated and were more willing to approach products. In colder days and in colder settings, consumers felt less activation. Because of the increased activation, consumers were happier with riskier decisions when it was warm, but were more likely to play it safe when it was colder.

Can savvy store managers just turn up the temperature when they want to get you to try new, potentially risky products? Maybe, although people do get used to temperatures and experience them less intensely over time. But this research shows that ambient factors can fundamentally affect our psychology. We might think of ourselves as rational decision-makers, but if temperature can affect us, our bodies in general might impact our decision-making more than we previously thought. To keep a cool mind, keeping your body cool could be a first step.