Social Thermoregulation: A Meta-Analysis

One key motivating force for bonding across animals is their need to regulate body temperature, also called social thermoregulation. This phenomenon has been extensively documented in animals, but only recently its existence has been suggested in humans. Psychology, however, has been faced with conflicting findings and the social thermoregulation literature has been no exception. We conducted a meta-analysis of the social thermoregulation literature in humans with the goal of estimating bias-corrected effect sizes and examining the evidential value. We included studies in English on humans and coded studies based on three theoretical frameworks (Bargh, Lakoff, and IJzerman). We found that temperature can be “primed” and that support for “compensation” is mixed. Social thermoregulation’s effect sizes are symmetrical and bidirectional and there was insufficient data available to examine claims about moderation by attachment and latitude. Further, based on the available information in the literature, we cannot establish whether social thermoregulatory behaviors and cognitions are automatic. Results for different subfields (e.g., Emotion, Interpersonal) and methods (e.g., verbal/visual or tactile prime) were mixed. Results for the full dataset were moderated by proportion of women in the dataset, but no moderation by climate was detected. Standard error also decreased over the years, meaning that publication practices in this literature are slightly improving, but heterogeneity is substantial. Better measurements, more diverse samples, and Registered Reports will be necessary for a higher-quality social thermoregulation literature.