It's probably because cockroaches make people cranky and irritable, and cockroaches are more active when it's warm.
F&@K YOU YOU F*%KING PIECE OF S#@T!...ahem
There's the embodied cognition angle. Physical warmth and emotional warmth are connection, which one could spin for both romantic passion and violent stereotypes.
OTOH India has a low homicide rate. At least in the stats.
Cold and crime: people stay indoors, duh.
People stay indoors in heat too...or is that just me?
There's a lot less you can do to hide from the heat than from the cold, if you're not wealthy. I can sit at home in my air-conditioning, but I know plenty of people who don't have air conditioning or have way less effective air conditioning. On the other hand, blankets and sweaters are fairly cheap.
So are jackets and gloves. I find myself much more willing to go out in the cold (just layer up) than in the heat (you're doomed).
Which would suggest that it's easier to defend against the cold than the heat, thus heat would have a bigger impact on behavior.
From: (Anonymous)
2012-08-12 03:00 pm (UTC)
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Only the rich ones who have air conditioning and don't mind the electricity cost.
Cold makes people commit suicide.
I suppose that could stem from crankiness.
Can you justify that assertion? IIRC most suicides occur in the spring and summer.
Darkness, not cold. It just happens to be cold during the dark months.
Once again, my major objection is 'self-restraint is a metabolically demanding task, that it produces lots of waste heat'. Why should a brain exercising self-restraint generate a significantly higher amount of heat? I can think of several things more likely to generate heat that aren't correlated with crime.
Like I said, it's a crackpot theory. My only "evidence" is that it would explain patterns of yawning, heat-related crime, the effect of cooling caps on insomnia, etc.
(there's also the studies on glucose helping recover from ego depletion, but I don't really trust those and it's only very indirect evidence anyway).
Most crimes - crimes you hear about, anyway - take place outside of the home. When it's cold you stay indoors and don't break into other peoples' houses. (They're more likely to be home anyway.)
Cold makes you more focused on yourself, because you're actively protecting yourself from the elements, and less likely to see opportunities to inflict criminal behavior on other people.
Teenagers and young adults (demographics most likely to commit crimes) don't "hang out" outdoors when it's cold; if they're outside the home they tend to be in supervised areas like malls.
Homeless people - again, demographically more likely to commit crimes of economic necessity - generally attempt to relocate to places where it is safe to spend the night outdoors.
I think those should be considered as reasons for more crimes in warmer climes.
I certainly observe more confrontations during the summer months, but as others have said, summer drives people outdoors and for longer time so the chances for friction are greatly increased, this alone should bury any more subtle effect that may or may not be there.
Regarding energy availability, my perception is that in summertime one has more, not less energy. People's muscles are flush with blood trying to lose heat, but also available for immediate use by the muscles. The kind of person likely to start whaling into you because you intrude in his personal space is more likely to listen to feedback from his muscles saying "Cold. Sluggish" than anything his frontal lobes might come up with.
Also within the range of 2pm to after 6 pm* I don't think anyone is doing much of anything and judging by the absence of police patrols I bet the statistics would agree.
There were a couple of people like that where I trained in Ireland, but it didn't seem anywhere near as bad as this article makes it sound. Of the somewhat fewew doctors I met in the US, one of them seemed like this, so maybe it's more common on this side of the Atlantic. Overall it seems like a predictable thing to have happen when you throw a bunch of really stressed perfectionist types together with people who are expected to know much more than they could reasonably have learned by that point.
yes, i remember your post on doctor zilla, and i remember thinking about how he was stuck in the immigrant place, that you (on account of your irish ed) and he both were immigrants, and he was going to teach you your place in the food chain. eeks. very systeme d.
It seems to me that the more hostile environment should decrease the intra-species competition. In the extreme environment, it should take less of an injury to push a predator beyond the point where it can't recover. Doubly so for social animals that are incapable of survival on their own in the cold.
You could picture the cold as common, deadly enemy, that eats the slightly weakened; not the best time for status fights where both animals may end up too weakened to survive.
Relevant: http://www.fight-entropy.com/2012/08/high-temperatures-cause-violent-crime.html http://www.fight-entropy.com/2012/08/high-temperatures-cause-violent-crime.html | 
