“I hate this heat:” Testing cognitive components of the heat-aggression hypothesis using data from Facebook

One longstanding finding in social psychology is that heat predicts aggression. However, existing research has yet to conclusively demonstrate a cognitive mechanism linking higher temperatures to aggressive behavior. Using a linguistic analysis of over 10 million Facebook status updates, we demonstrate that higher ambient temperatures are significantly correlated with more expressions of anger through social media. We argue that these findings are consistent with Anderson’s (2001) supposition that heat makes people irritable (and therefore more likely to interpret interactions as hostile), although the effect size is negligible.