Office managers are under siege. They know that if they set the temperature to 74, they hear from the woman in human resources who says it is too cold. If they turn it up to 76, they hear from the man in marketing who wants to know why it is sweltering hot.
It is summer, which means inside the supposed comfort of air-conditioned buildings, thousands of people are swearing that they are dying of heat, freezing to death or otherwise experiencing thermal discomfort.
These are not trivial wars: People have been known to bring thermometers to work to triumphantly prove to office managers that the temperature is not as advertised.
On the home front, conflict often rises with the mercury, as people in a household fight over the thermostat setting. Marital compromises usually leave one party freezing and the other burning up at the same bedroom temperature.
Sorry to burst your bubble. Psychological experiments show that people are not remotely as sensitive to temperature as they think they are.
“There is a very large mental component to feeling hot,” said psychologist William Howell, who has conducted experiments about how accurate people are at telling what the temperature is and about when people feel comfortable.
The experiments indicate that for the kind of arguments people have all the time – in which the range of temperature being argued about is often less than five degrees – psychological factors play at least as large a role as actual temperature does in determining comfort.
In one experiment, Howell had two groups of volunteers describe how comfortable they were in a room. Then he called one group back a couple of days later, after he had raised the temperature by five degrees. He told the volunteers he had lost their original answers, and quizzed them again about their perceptions of temperature and comfort.
With the second group, Howell held the temperature in the room steady but told the volunteers it was warmer than on the first day. Again, he had them fill out the questionnaires.
Both groups reported exactly the same changes in perception of temperature and comfort; Howell’s suggestion to the second group that it was warmer seems to have had the same effect as actually making the room warmer.
This is not to say that everything is psychological. Experiments show that people’s ability to attend to a task involving detailed concentration declines after the temperature crosses 79 degrees. Another experiment, which called for sustained attention, found that as the temperature rose from 74 degrees to 82 and then to 90, people grew more easily distracted.
“The take-home practical message as far as conservation is concerned is that one or two degrees nationwide could make a huge difference (in energy consumption) without having any substantial effect on comfort at all, if people were not locked into that mind-set,” Howell said.
Restaurant owners think they can lose customers by keeping a room too hot but not by keeping it too cold, and they have long erred on the side of freezing. Again, Howell said, raising the thermostat a few degrees in the summer probably will not hurt business – and would probably please the people whose teeth chatter when they sit down to lunch.
Of course, many people think that only other people are affected by psychological cues, whereas they themselves are as reliable as thermometers.
Sure.
Tell your office manager.
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