Culture and the Weather: Implications for Cognition and Motivation

Many cultural differences in behavioral and mental processes have been documented but why do individuals from different geographical regions exhibit different behaviors and mental processes? We have adopted an ecological perspective to understand why some cultures may exhibit certain behaviors more so than others. We examined the relationships between weather instability and various constructs included in Hofstede’s values across the world. Weather instability data were obtained from Wunderground. Measures of psychological values and constructs were obtained from the 2016 World Values Survey. We included only countries that did not have a huge variation of weather patterns, and thus excluded countries covering a large mass/weather regions (such as U.S., China, Russian, and Canada). As a result, we had 90 countries included in the analysis. These are the major findings:

1. Weather instability is positively related to distance from the equator
2. More unstable weather is associated with more independence, more uncertainty avoidance, and more long-term orientation.
3. Surprisingly, more unstable weather is associated with less religion.
4. In addition, weather instability predicted less generosity, and less belief in people’s freedom to make life choices.

All these correlations remain significant even after controlling for country’s (log) GDP. We will discuss how some of these findings support our predictions, and how we attempt in a future study to replicate the effects found within a single country (e.g., the United States).