Why do violent crimes usually occur at night? Why are people more willing to help on sunny days? Why are dark environments more willing to confide in others about privacy? Why is hook-up behavior more successful on sunny days with good natural light conditions?
Light plays a pivotal role in the entire biological evolution of the Earth, not only providing the basic visual basis for us to see the size, color and shape of objects in our surroundings, that is, the image visual function of light, but also affecting many physiological and psychological functions of organisms through the third type of new type of photoreceptor cells on the human retina - intrinsic photosensitive ganglion cells.
Lighting and attack behavior
Most studies of natural light and aggressive behavior have found that the light intensity of natural light is inversely correlated with the occurrence of aggressive behavior. For example, individuals with mild seasonal mood disorder are more socially active in high-brightness natural light conditions, more accommodating in interpersonal communication, and significantly less violent and quarrelsome behavior. A long-term follow-up study showed that violent crimes typically occur at night when there is less daylight exposure.
Another study explored the relationship between weather conditions and time-related factors and the number of reported cases of domestic violence and rape, and found that domestic violence and rape were more likely to occur after sunsets with less natural light.
Illumination and social altruism
As early as 1979, psychologist Cunningham proposed the hypothesis of "sunshine samaritan". His experiments in the spring, summer, and winter seasons found that in the weather with higher sunshine intensity, the frequency of helping behavior occurred more frequently, while the influence of temperature, humidity, wind speed and moon phase was relatively weak.
The field experiment studied spontaneous help behavior, and under the condition of controlling the temperature, measured whether passers-by would actively remind the main test item to fall on sunny days with strong natural light and cloudy days with weak natural light, that is, people were more willing to help on sunny days.
Illumination and moral decision-making
Subjects living in low-light environments were more likely to get more game rewards by deception, and participants wearing dark sunglasses showed more selfish behavior in the dictator game than participants wearing transparent glasses, and anonymity played a mediating role in dark and selfish behavior.
Based on the metaphorical connection between light and kindness, brightness can enhance the individual's moral self and thus promote the occurrence of moral behavior, compared with the participants in the dark light environment, the participants in the bright environment showed less selfish behavior in the game game, and were willing to donate more money, make more charitable behaviors, and the moral self mediated between bright and moral behavior.
Lighting and self-control
Compared with participants in low-light rooms, participants in bright-light rooms subjectively reported a higher degree of public self-awareness. Whether through actual lighting environment manipulation or concept initiation manipulation, Bright can induce participants to use more controlled and reflective self-regulation strategies.
In addition, the bright light is also able to suppress desires and irrational impulses, which reflect a higher level of self-control.
Lighting and conflict resolution
Earlier studies have found that people are more likely to use cooperative, conciliatory, rather than confrontational positive coping methods to resolve interpersonal conflicts in warm white light environments with low color temperatures. In a follow-up study, they strictly manipulated illuminance and color temperature, and found that individuals in a warm white light (3000 k) illumination environment were more likely to resolve interpersonal conflicts and conflicts through cooperation rather than escape than cold white light (4200 k).
Illumination and self-disclosure
Previous studies have found that subjects in dark environments are more likely to hug strangers and reveal their private information to others. The study found that bright light not only increases the general communication between participants, but also increases intimate communication, which may be caused by the sense of spaciousness caused by bright light.
Studies on doctor-patient communication have also found that having participants imagine themselves in a bright room as opposed to a dimly lit room can effectively improve participants' willingness to self-disclosure.
Illumination and other social psychology and behavior
Studies have found that participants in warm color temperature lighting environments are more likely to give virtual job seekers more positive skills appraisal and behavioral performance evaluation.
Lighting also affects the processing of stereotypes. When an individual feels threatened, it facilitates his processing of negative stereotypes and prejudices. The dark light environment acts as a threatening stimulus that makes the individual feel dangerous, thus inducing the individual's motivation to protect himself. When people are in a dark room, individuals with obvious tendencies for self-protection may extract words such as criminals and untrustworthiness from their working memory to form stereotypes of black people or other races (such as Iranians), but they will not extract words such as laziness and ignorance to summarize stereotypes of black people.
After controlling the temperature, observing men asking women for phone numbers, it was found that this kind of hook-up behavior had a higher success rate on sunny days with good natural light conditions. A follow-up study of large natural field experiments found that personality traits play a regulatory role between natural light and social behavior. Specifically, men with high Marksiavellian scores in the Dark Trio were able to get more positive feedback from the women they were hooked to under cloudy conditions.
Emotions say
The effect of natural light on emotions has been confirmed and confirmed in a series of studies in the fields of social psychology and experimental economics, and the current consensus is that natural light can induce positive emotions. Specifically, the shorter the daily sunshine time and the higher the relative humidity of the air, the lower the mood of the individual; Individuals on sunny sunny days are happier than on cloudy, cloudy days.
The study found that participants on sunny days were happier and more satisfied with their lives than participants on cloudy days. Similar results were found when exploring the impact of weather factors on stock prices. Studies randomly assigned participants to sunny and cloudy conditions found that sunlight can induce more positive self-reported emotions. A recent study used natural light as an emotional indicator to explore the influence of emotions on credit issuance, and found that positive emotions induced on sunny days help credit issuance, while negative emotions induced on cloudy days are not conducive to credit issuance, and the mechanism behind the mechanism is that the emotions induced by natural light affect the risk tolerance and subjective judgment of managers.
The theory of interdependent self-construction
Self-construction refers to the tendency of individuals to self-define. Self-construction is mainly divided into independent self-construction and interdependent self-construction. The former pays attention to its own uniqueness, pursues the independence of the individual, and the self-representation associated with it mostly involves personal traits, abilities and preferences; The latter focuses on their own connection with others, desire to have good interpersonal relationships, and their self-representation is mostly based on interpersonal communication backgrounds. Low light increases the level of self-building of interdependent types, thereby increasing cooperative behavior.
Anonymous sense said
The study found that the dim indoor light environment can induce participants to produce an illusory sense of anonymity, which leads to more self-interested behavior. This is all because the low-light environment can trigger people to have an illusion of anonymity, so that participants subjectively believe that their identity is hidden, others can not observe their own behavior, and then make people's self-interest and immoral behavior de-inhibited. In bright light environments, participants have an illusion of de-anonymization, and thus exhibit less self-interested behavior.
Moral self-talk
The moral self hypothesis holds that bright light will highlight people's moral self, thereby further increasing the likelihood that people will commit moral behavior. Moral self-prominence plays an intermediary role in the influence of illumination on moral behavior. Studies have found that bright indoor light environments can make individuals' moral self-prominence, thereby increasing moral behavior.
Conceptual metaphorical theory in embodied cognition theory
Darkness symbolizes evil, while light symbolizes goodness. In recent years, many empirical studies have supported this metaphorical mapping. In general, embodied cognitive theory holds that at the level of conceptual metaphors, people associate black or dark visual perception with immorality, and white or bright visual perception with morality. Participants in the low-light environment group were more likely than participants in the bright-light environment group to believe that they would be treated unfairly by their collaborators in the distribution of remuneration and expected lower remuneration. This proves that the low-light environment is more likely than the bright light environment to trigger the subject's association of negative moral traits, and when the subject's thinking involves moral factors, the light will have a direct impact on the moral cognitive judgment.
Advances in Psychological Science, 2018, 26(6): 1083-1095 doi: 10.3724/sp.j.1042.2018.01083