Determinism Redux

Research on climate and behavior has been guided by one of four models: climatic determinism, dismissal of climatic factors, cultural mediation of climatic effects, and redux. The last model predicts that climate exerts direct as well as indirect effects upon behavior. This model's predictions were assessed by correlating suicide and homicide rates in different nations with three measures of climatological conditions and an equal number of sociocultural variables. Apparent correlations between homicides and climatic variables vanished when a social variable (life expectancy) was partialled out, but an inverse relationship between temperature and suicides retained its significance in analyses that included controls for socioeconomic conditions. It is suggested that research on climate and behavior has been hampered by single-factor explanations, which earlier led investigators to ignore cultural factors and now lead them to deny environmental factors.