Too Hot or Too Cold at Work? Best Bet Is to Chill Out

The psychologist thinks our perceptions of comfort and discomfort are at least partly determined by social cues. That annual staple of summer and winter media reports -- tales of unbearably hot summers and unbearably cold winters -- probably contributes to people's perceptions that it is uncomfortably hot or cold.

Howell has lived in both Arizona and Ohio. As people who move from warm places to cold climes and vice versa realize, human beings are capable of adapting to a very wide range of temperatures.

This is not to say that people ought to feel fine when it is zero or 100 degrees. Not everything is psychological. In fact, experiments show that people's ability to attend to a task involving detailed concentration declines after the temperature crosses 79 degrees. Another experiment, which called for sustained attention, found that as the temperature rose from 74 degrees to 82 degrees and then to 90 degrees, people grew more distractible.

"The take-home practical message as far as conservation is concerned is that one or two degrees nationwide could make a huge difference (in energy consumption) without having any substantial effect on comfort at all, if people were not locked into that mind-set," Howell said.

Restaurant owners think they can lose customers by keeping a room too hot but not by keeping it too cold, and they have long erred on the side of freezing. Again, Howell said, raising the thermostat by a few degrees in the summer probably will not hurt business -- and would probably please the people whose teeth chatter when they sit down to lunch.

Of course, many people think that only other people are affected by psychological cues, whereas they themselves are as reliable as thermometers.

Sure.

Tell your office manager.