A new study from the University of British Columbia (UBC) has uncovered regular seasonal variations in people’s moral values, potentially impacting politics, law, and health.
The research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) analyzed survey responses from more than 230,000 people in the U.S. over 10 years and revealed that people’s embrace of certain moral values fluctuates depending on the time of year. The seasonal patterns also emerged in smaller data samples from Canada and Australia.
“People’s endorsement of moral values that promote group cohesion and conformity is stronger in the spring and fall than it is in the summer and winter,” said Ian Hohm, the study’s first author and a doctoral student in UBC’s psychology department. “Moral values are a fundamental part of how people make decisions and form judgments, so we think this finding might just be the tip of the iceberg in that it has implications for all sorts of other downstream effects.”
Since 2009, a website established by social psychology researchers has been collecting survey data that measures participants’ endorsement of five moral values:
Loyalty: Valuing devotion to one’s group and maintaining strong group bonds.
Authority: Respecting and following leadership and established rules.
Purity: Emphasizing cleanliness, sanctity and upholding tradition.
Care: Prioritizing kindness and preventing harm to others.
Fairness: Ensuring equal treatment for everyone.
Loyalty, authority and purity are referred to by researchers as “binding” values because they encourage conformity to group norms. They also align closely with modern political conservatism. Care and fairness may be considered more liberal values, with their focus on individual rights and welfare. All have been shown by research to guide people’s judgments about right and wrong.
The researchers found that respondents endorsed the “binding” values more strongly in spring and fall, but not as much in summer and winter – a pattern that was remarkably consistent over 10 years.
They also found evidence that the summer decrease in endorsement of binding moral values was more pronounced in areas with more extreme seasonal climate differences.
Anxiety a possible explanation
The study observed a potential link between these seasonal moral shifts and levels of anxiety, using large-scale data on seasonal anxiety provided by Dr. Brian O’Shea, a co-author of the paper and assistant professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham.
“We noticed that anxiety levels peak in the spring and autumn, which coincides with the periods when people endorse binding values more strongly,” said Dr. Mark Schaller, the study’s senior author and a professor of psychology at UBC. “This correlation suggests that higher anxiety may drive people to seek comfort in the group norms and traditions upheld by binding values.“
Source: Science Daily