Abstract
Accumulating evidence indicates that environmental temperature substantially affects economic outcomes and violence, but the reasons for this linkage are only partially understood. We study whether temperature directly influences behaviour by evaluating the effect of thermal stress on multiple dimensions of economic decision-making, judgement, and destructive behaviour with 2,000 participants in Kenya and the US who were randomly assigned to different temperatures in a laboratory. The main finding is that most major dimensions of economic decision-making are unaffected by temperature. We also find that heat significantly increases willingness to voluntarily destroy other participants’ assets in the Kenyan sample.
Footnotes
We thank Botond Kozegi, Bertil Tungodden, and many seminar participants for useful comments. This project was supported by the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study and the Swedish Research Council. Ingvild Almås and Tessa Bold thank Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (M16:0345:1) for their support. The authors declare no competing financial interests. A randomised controlled trials registry entry is available at https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/1361. This study has complied with all relevant ethical regulations. The University of California, Berkeley Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects and the Kenya Medical Research Institute Scientific and Ethics Review Unit approved the study protocols. Informed consent was obtained from all participants. All authors contributed equally to this work, and are listed in alphabetical order. Corresponding authors: Ingvild Almås, [email protected], and Edward Miguel, [email protected].
Accepted manuscripts
