Of course, well-being measures will only be useful in these applied and theoretical settings if the scores that are obtained from these measures are reliable and valid. The rationale behind this recommendation is that (a) existing indicators (which are primarily economic in nature) provide an incomplete view of quality of life (b) different people may define quality of life differently and subjective measures let people weight various factors in different ways and (c) well-being surveys are relatively inexpensive and easy to administer, which means that large amounts of data can be acquired relatively easily. Psychologists and economists have also called for the use of SWB measures as guides for policy decisions (e.g., Diener & Seligman, 2004 Diener, Lucas, Schimmack, & Helliwell, 2009 Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004). This can inform theories about basic needs, while simultaneously providing practical guidance to individuals who may want to improve the quality of their lives. By studying the causes, correlates, and outcomes of SWB, psychologists can identify resources and life circumstances that are necessary for people to thrive. Traditionally, psychologists have used SWB measures to examine the characteristics of happy and unhappy people. Subjective well-being (SWB) reflects an overarching evaluation of the quality of a person’s life from his or her own perspective ( Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999). To understand why weather might affect well-being judgments, it is first necessary to understand the processes that underlie the judgments themselves. In other words, we seek to determine whether life seems better when the weather is good.The Processes Underlying Well-Being Judgments The goal of the current paper is to examine whether the effects of weather conditions extend to judgments about one’s life as a whole. Taken together, these studies show that weather can have a powerful effect on people’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Still other studies show that extreme heat can be linked with higher levels of aggressive behavior ( Anderson, 1989). Other research shows that people behave more altruistically on sunny days than cloudy days ( Cunningham, 1979) and even that stock market returns are higher on sunny days than on cloudy days ( Hirshleifer & Shumway, 2003). For instance, Simonsohn (2010) showed that people are more likely to enroll in an academically rigorous college if they visited that college on a cloudy day as compared to a sunny day. Yet in recent years, social scientists have documented an increasingly diverse set of research findings that show more surprising links between weather conditions and more complex psychological phenomena. Some of these effects are unsurprising and mundane, including the effects of weather on the clothes that people wear, the mode of transportation that people may take to work, and the specific recreational activities in which people engage (few people choose to picnic in the rain). Weather conditions, including precipitation, sunshine, temperature, and humidity, can have potentially large effects on people’s behaviors. One of the most salient features of people’s daily environment is the weather to which they are exposed.
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