Homelike thermoregulation: How physical coldness makes an advertised house a home

- Maintaining a core body temperature is crucial for survival.
- This process is facilitated interpersonally, and coldness causes affiliation.
- We link temperature and affiliation to judgments of houses as homes.
- Colder temperatures increase need for affiliation and ratings of homeliness.
- These ratings affect interest in and willingness to pay for the house.

House brokers typically intuit that any type of warmth causes people to buy houses more frequently. Is this empirical reality? The authors investigated this through people's attachment towards advertised houses. A wealth of research has now linked thermoregulation to relationships (cf. IJzerman et al., 2015), and here the authors purport that this extends to people's relationships with house as a more novel solution to an ancient problem: shielding from the cold. The present package tests a preregistered idea that colder temperatures increase people's need to affiliate and, in turn, increase people's estimations of how homely a house is (measured through communality). The hypotheses of the first two studies were partly right: the authors only found that actual lower temperatures (not motivation and through a cup and outside temperature) induced people to find a house more communal, predicted by their need to affiliate. Importantly, this even predicts whether people find the house more attractive, and increases their willingness to pay for the house (Studies 1 and 2). The third study did not pan out as predicted, but still affected people's need to affiliate. The authors reason that this was caused by a methodological shortcoming (namely not as strongly being affected by temperature). The present work provides novel insights into how a house becomes a home.