Moral Values Shift With The Seasons, Possibly Due To Anxiety, Making People More Loyal In The Fall And Spring, According To Recent Research
Humans often change with the seasons. Throughout the year, our emotional states, diets, physical activity levels, and even color preferences fluctuate.
A new study has demonstrated that moral values can also experience a shift. It’s just something to keep in mind as autumn settles in.
Researchers analyzed over 230,000 responses from a decade’s worth of online surveys from people in the United States, along with smaller groups in Australia and Canada. The questions in the surveys were based on the framework that social scientists use to evaluate people’s judgments of right and wrong.
According to Ian Hohm, the lead author of the study and a graduate student of psychology at the University of British Columbia, the framework is called moral foundations theory. It is composed of five fundamental values that inform human social behavior.
Authority (respect for rules and leaders), loyalty (devotion to one’s own group), and purity (cleanliness and piety) are all foundational “binding values” that are associated with conformity and togetherness.
They can boost cooperation among members of an in-group, but they can also increase prejudice against those outside of an in-group.
These principles were weaker in the summer and winter. The more extreme the seasonal weather differences were in summer, the more notable the effect was. That means people are more loyal in the fall and spring.
Fairness (treating everyone equally) and care (preventing harm to others) are thought of as individual values and rights. They did not illustrate a consistent seasonal pattern.
The seasonal swings can be explained by anxiety. The researchers gathered data from 90,000 survey respondents and Internet search frequencies and discovered that anxiety levels peak in the spring and fall.
Monkey Business – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual people or dog
“There is a close relationship between anxiety and threat,” said Brian O’Shea, a co-author of the study and a psychologist at the University of Nottingham. “When you’re threatened, you then want to get protection from your in-group.”
The higher anxiety levels may cause people to place more emphasis on binding values, long-standing traditions, and close-knit social groups.
Other studies have revealed that people who feel more vulnerable to seasonal illnesses tend to be more distrustful and have a greater likelihood of conforming to the majority opinion.
Overall, these findings indicate that seasonal timing could influence decisions for major court cases, vaccination campaigns, and even election outcomes.
“People who endorse binding values tend to be more punitive toward people who commit crimes. And if you think about the millions of court cases that happen every year, this change could potentially push some judges and juries in really close call verdicts toward harsher punishments in spring and more lenient sentences in summer or during the winter holidays,” Hohm said.
A limitation of the study is that it relies on data from populations that are “Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD).”
So, the pattern might not be seen in marginalized groups. Still, it does reveal how the seasons affect human psychology.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.
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