UNIT 7

3 READING c Read the article and check your answers in 3b.

a What differences are there between
friendships that are mostly face-to-face and those
that are mostly online?
b Do you think these ideas are true or false?
Why?
1 Feeling colder improves our ability to understand
other people.
2 Increasing the temperature of a room could help
resolve an argument.
3 Some national and regional personality
characteristics can be explained by climate.
4 Feeling warmer makes us feel more connected to
other people.
5 Loneliness can affect your physical health.
d Read the article again and answer the questions.
1 How can cold make people more understanding?
2 What did the computer ball game tell researchers about
loneliness? What two outcomes told researchers this?
3 What kind of research has ‘been in the doghouse lately’? Why?
4 Why does the author think the findings will ‘hold up’?
5 What’s the writer’s suggestion about the relationship between
social media and the absence of heat?
6 Why does the writer suggest that having hot baths is a good
idea?
e Discuss the questions.
1 In your experience, is the research about warmth and
understanding the points of view of other people believable?
2 What other ways can you think of to help people who feel lonely?

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LONELINESS AND to judge a room’s temperature as colder.

TEMPERATURE This kind of research – about how seemingly

Does coldness really
make people feel lonely?
Oliver Burkeman
According to new research, people exposed to warmer
temperatures find it harder to grasp viewpoints other than
their own, while those exposed to colder ones find it easier.
It seems that in order to take the heat out of a disagreement,
you should literally take the heat out of the room. Since
I’ve always preferred the cold this was music to my ears.
It’s tempting to extrapolate: might this explain the affable
tolerance of Canadians, say, or the history of prejudice in the
US south? Sadly, on closer reading, the study is only a partial
victory for cold. We’re better at seeing other perspectives
when we’re chilly, the researchers argue, because cold
triggers a sense of social distance. It reminds us of our
separateness, and thus the fact that others aren’t like us. We
gain perspective at the cost of intimacy.
So what looks, at first, like a surprising result turns out to
reinforce one of the most intriguing psychological findings
of recent years: that coldness makes people feel lonely. The
opposite’s also true: loneliness makes people feel cold. In one
experiment, students played a computer game in which they
threw a ball back and forth with other on-screen characters,
each of whom they (wrongly) believed was controlled by
another student, playing elsewhere. After a while, the
others sometimes began to keep the ball to themselves.
Subsequently, players who’d been thus ostracised showed
a marked preference for hot foods over cold ones; non-
ostracised players didn’t. In a recent rerun of the experiment,
ostracism led to a drop in skin temperature. Other studies
have found that hot baths relieve loneliness, and that merely
being reminded of an experience of exclusion prompts people
innocuous aspects of our surroundings can
exert powerful effects – has been in the
doghouse lately; several classic findings have
proved difficult to replicate. It’s no longer clear,
for example, whether being exposed to words
associated with old age (‘grey’, ‘bingo’) really
does make people start walking more slowly.
But there’s reason to believe the link between
loneliness and temperature will hold up. It’s no
mere matter of word association: temperature
may be a crucial way our bodies keep track of
whether we’re getting the social contact we
need. It’s easy to see why natural selection
might have given us a yearning to be near
friendly fellow tribe members: they were crucial
for food, security and relationships. People
worry that social media are making us lonely
and isolated, but what if that is exactly half-
true? What if they are not making us isolated
– online connections are real, after all – but are
making us feel lonely, partly because those
connections don’t involve heat?
It sounds silly that hot baths and soup might
be the answer to loneliness. Surely the only
real answer to loneliness is real connection?
But a feeling of isolation makes people try
less hard to connect. So a nudge in the right
direction – even a bath – can’t hurt. (And
severe loneliness really can hurt, physically: it’s
been found to exacerbate numerous serious
diseases.) But I’m a cold-lover.
Does that mean I hate people? I hope not.
When I really think about it, the thing I love
most about cold weather is coming back into
the warmth.

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