Determinism Revisited

In the last few decades, social scientists have been reluctant to deal with the relationship between weather and human behavior, owing in part to the discredit brought to such studies by the excesses of the determinists. The few studies undertaken have generally relied on ambient temperature as a measure of stress. In the present work, a discomfort index was related to the incidence of aggravated assault in Dallas, Texas, for an eight-month period from March through October 1980. Some 4000 assault events were aggregated on a daily basis and related to three variables: discomfort index, day of the week, and month. The resulting model accounted for 71% of the variation in assault incidence. The discomfort index yielded significant F statistics whether entered first, second, or third in the model, indicating a significant main effect in spite of its collinearity with month. The analysis supports experimental laboratory evidence suggesting that heat stress is associated with aggressive behavior.