Our Morals Change with the Seasons

The seasons have been shown to influence many elements of our psyches and behavior: mood, color preferences, how charitable we are, even cognitive performance. But recently, researchers found they may also affect what we tend to consider among our most profoundly held convictions: how we decide what is right and wrong.

A team of researchers looked at a decade’s worth of responses to an online survey about morals and analyzed how these responses changed from one season to the next. Their findings, published recently in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, suggest that, at a population level, people are less likely to endorse more traditional moral values in summer and winter.

The team of researchers relied on data from a website called YourMorals.org, a collaboration between cognitive scientists and social psychologists, including social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. The website offers a “moral foundations questionnaire,” where respondents can rate how strongly they agree or disagree that something is right or wrong.

The questions were formulated based on moral foundations theory, a framework devised by Haidt and other social and cultural psychologists to explore why morality seems to follow similar patterns across populations from very different cultures. The theory is built upon the idea that moral values are often influenced by motivations around factors like cooperation, safety, and reproduction, rather than a universal sense of goodness. According to the framework, morality can be broken down into five foundational values—care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity—and these belong to two clusters: individualizing values and binding values.

Some values seemed to peak in spring and fall, and dip in the winter and summer.

The seasonal pattern in response was not evident for all types of values. For instance, individualizing values, defined as ones that include care and fairness, focusing on the morality of individual rights, showed little variation over time and didn’t follow a seasonal trend.

However, binding values—values that prioritize the needs of one’s group, including loyalty, respect for authority, and purity of tradition—followed a biannual pattern. Endorsement of these values seemed to peak in spring and fall, and dip in the winter and summer. “And we found that this pattern repeats year after year after year” among respondents in the United States, says Ian Hohm—a psychology researcher at the University of British Columbia and one of the authors of the study—even after variables like demographics were accounted for. The same seasonal shift was also found in data from Canada and Australia—though not the United Kingdom.

To attempt to better understand the results, the researchers also looked at patterns in Google search results related to anxiety as well as seven years of anxiety-related mental health data from Project Implicit Health. In previous research, belief in binding values has been linked with feeling threatened. “When people feel threatened, they want … to band together within their group, and that’s a process that’s facilitated by everyone valuing loyalty and respect for authority and respect for group norms and traditions,” says Hohm. What they found was that population-level patterns in anxiety also followed a seasonal cycle—peaking in the spring and fall, which suggests a potential correlation.

Spring and fall are often thought of as the most pleasant seasons, so an increase in anxiety during these times might seem counter-intuitive. But it’s possible that increases in school and work-related transitions during these times could play some role, as has been found in Japan, the researchers hypothesize. They also suggest that anxiety might decrease in winter due to seasonal holidays, and in summer due to warmer weather and increased vegetation.

“On one hand, a surprising finding, but at the same time, it’s also a finding that fits perfectly with an existing literature on … moral foundations theory,” says Simone Schnall, a professor of experimental social psychology at University of Cambridge who wasn’t involved with the study.

Because the study looks at correlations, it’s important to not infer that the weather is causing shifts in morality, Schnall points out. Rather, fluctuations through seasons support that morality is not always as rational and objective as we may think, she says. In her own research, Schnall has found that disgust and also the fear of COVID can make some people more judgmental of others.

Dramatic seasonal shifts in morality also don’t necessarily apply at an individual level. “People shouldn’t think that they’re changing from total rule followers to total nonconformists in different seasons,” says Hohm. Instead, the results point to the possibility that if multiple individuals are slightly shifting their thinking around morals throughout the year, that will inform their everyday actions and decisions, which may collectively nudge the trends in a population, such as how likely people are to discriminate against a particular group, how punitive a legal system is, or how likely people are to follow the government’s advice.

“We often think of moral values as these unchangeable principles that we hold close,” Hohm says. But they’re actually subject to all kinds of influences that might pass us by unnoticed. Being aware of how that happens could help us better understand and plan for seasonal shifts in the social and political spheres.

Lead image: Ernesto Ochoa / Shutterstock

• Alice Sun

  Posted on September 9, 2024

  Alice Sun is a science journalist based in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her work frequently covers biology, the environment, social science, mental health, and more. More of her work can be found on her website and X (formerly known as Twitter).