A new UBC study has revealed regular seasonal shifts in people’s moral values.

The finding has potential implications for politics, law and health—including the timing of elections and court cases, as well as public response to a health crisis.

The research published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed survey responses from more than 230,000 people in the U.S. over 10 years and revealed that people’s embrace of certain moral values fluctuates depending on the time of year. The seasonal patterns also emerged in smaller data samples from Canada and Australia.

“People’s endorsement of moral values that promote group cohesion and conformity is stronger in the spring and fall than it is in the summer and winter,” said Ian Hohm, the study’s first author and a doctoral student in UBC’s psychology department.

“Moral values are a fundamental part of how people make decisions and form judgments, so we think this finding might just be the tip of the iceberg in that it has implications for all sorts of other downstream effects.”

Since 2009, a website established by social psychology researchers has been collecting survey data that measures participants’ endorsement of five moral values:

1. Loyalty: Valuing devotion to one’s group and maintaining strong group bonds.
2. Authority: Respecting and following leadership and established rules.
3. Purity: Emphasizing cleanliness, sanctity and upholding tradition.
4. Care: Prioritizing kindness and preventing harm to others.
5. Fairness: Ensuring equal treatment for everyone.

Loyalty, authority and purity are referred to by researchers as “binding” values because they encourage conformity to group norms. They also align closely with modern political conservatism. Care and fairness may be considered more liberal values, with their focus on individual rights and welfare. All have been shown by research to guide people’s judgments about right and wrong.

The researchers found that respondents endorsed the “binding” values more strongly in spring and fall, but not as much in summer and winter—a pattern that was remarkably consistent over 10 years.

They also found evidence that the summer decrease in endorsement of binding moral values was more pronounced in areas with more extreme seasonal climate differences.

Anxiety a possible explanation

The study observed a potential link between these seasonal moral shifts and levels of anxiety, using large-scale data on seasonal anxiety provided by Dr. Brian O’Shea, a co-author of the paper and assistant professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham.

“We noticed that anxiety levels peak in the spring and autumn, which coincides with the periods when people endorse binding values more strongly,” said Dr. Mark Schaller, the study’s senior author and a professor of psychology at UBC. “This correlation suggests that higher anxiety may drive people to seek comfort in the group norms and traditions upheld by binding values.”

Implications for politics, law, health, social relations

The findings have wide-reaching implications, with potential examples including:

• Elections: The timing of elections could have an impact on outcomes, as shifts in moral values influence political opinions and behaviors.
• Legal judgments: The timing of trials and legal decisions could be influenced by seasonal variations in moral values, because those who endorse “binding” values tend to be more punitive of those who commit crimes and violate social norms.
• Disease response: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the extent to which people followed social distancing guidelines and were vaccinated was influenced by their moral values. Knowing these values change with the seasons could help tailor more effective health campaigns.
• Intergroup prejudice: Seasonal changes in moral values might affect how people view outsiders or those who don’t conform to group norms.

The research team plans to delve deeper into the connections between anxiety and moral values and to investigate how these seasonal patterns influence prejudices and legal judgments.

Mayonnaise continues to help researchers better understand the physics behind nuclear fusion.

“We’re still working on the same problem, which is the structural integrity of fusion capsules used in inertial confinement fusion, and Hellmann’s Real Mayonnaise is still helping us in the search for solutions,” says Arindam Banerjee, the Paul B. Reinhold Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics at Lehigh University and Chair of the MEM department in the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science.

In simple terms, fusion reactions are what power the sun. If the process could be harnessed on earth, scientists believe it could offer a nearly limitless and clean energy source for humanity. However, replicating the sun’s extreme conditions is an incredibly complex challenge. Researchers across science and engineering disciplines, including Banerjee and his team, are examining the problem from a multitude of perspectives.

Inertial confinement fusion is a process that initiates nuclear fusion reactions by rapidly compressing and heating capsules filled with fuel, in this case, isotopes of hydrogen. When subjected to extreme temperatures and pressure, these capsules melt and form plasma, the charged state of matter that can generate energy.

“At those extremes, you’re talking about millions of degrees Kelvin and gigapascals of pressure as you’re trying to simulate conditions in the sun,” says Banerjee. “One of the main problems associated with this process is that the plasma state forms these hydrodynamic instabilities, which can reduce the energy yield.”

In their first paper on the topic back in 2019, Banerjee and his team examined that problem, known as Rayleigh-Taylor instability. The condition occurs between materials of different densities when the density and pressure gradients are in opposite directions, creating an unstable stratification.

“We use mayonnaise because it behaves like a solid, but when subjected to a pressure gradient, it starts to flow,” he says. Using the condiment also negates the need for high temperatures and pressure conditions, which are exceedingly difficult to control.

Banerjee’s team used a custom-built, one-of-a-kind rotating wheel facility within Banerjee’s Turbulent Mixing Laboratory to mimic the flow conditions of the plasma. Once the acceleration crossed a critical value, the mayo started to flow.

One of the things they figured out during that initial research was that before the flow became unstable, the soft solid, i.e., the mayo, went through a couple of phases.

“As with a traditional molten metal, if you put a stress on mayonnaise, it will start to deform, but if you remove the stress, it goes back to its original shape,” he says. “So there’s an elastic phase followed by a stable plastic phase. The next phase is when it starts flowing, and that’s where the instability kicks in.”

Understanding this transition between the elastic phase and the stable plastic phase is critical, he says, because knowing when the plastic deformation starts might tip off researchers as to when the instability would occur, Banerjee says. Then, they’d look to control the condition in order to stay within this elastic or stable plastic phase.

In their latest paper, published in Physical Review E, the team (including former graduate student and first author of the study, Aren Boyaci ’24 Ph.D., now working at Rattunde AG as a Data Modeling Engineer in Berlin, Germany), looked at the material properties, the perturbation geometry (amplitude and wavelength), and the acceleration rate of the materials that undergo Rayleigh-Taylor instability.

“We investigated the transition criteria between the phases of Rayleigh-Taylor instability, and examined how that affected the perturbation growth in the following phases,” Boyaci says. “We found the conditions under which the elastic recovery was possible, and how it could be maximized to delay or completely suppress the instability. The experimental data we present are also the first recovery measurements in the literature.”

The finding is an important one as it could inform the design of the capsules in such a way that they never become unstable.

There is, however, the looming question of how the team’s data fit into what happens in actual fusion capsules, the property values of which are orders of magnitude different from the soft solids used in their experiments.

“In this paper, we have non-dimensionalized our data with the hope that the behavior we are predicting transcends these few orders of magnitude,” says Banerjee. “We’re trying to enhance the predictability of what would happen with those molten, high-temperature, high-pressure plasma capsules with these analog experiments of using mayonnaise in a rotating wheel.”

Ultimately, Banerjee and his team are part of a global effort to turn the promise of fusion energy into reality.

“We’re another cog in this giant wheel of researchers,” he says. “And we’re all working towards making inertial fusion cheaper and therefore, attainable.”