Battle for the thermostat: Gender and the effect of temperature on cognitive performance

Tom Y Chang and Agne Kajackaite

PLOS ONE, 2019, vol. 14, issue 5, 1-10

Abstract: This paper studies differences in the effect of temperature on cognitive performance by gender in a large controlled lab experiment (N = 543). We study performance in math, verbal and cognitive reflection tasks and find that the effects of temperature vary significantly across men and women. At higher temperatures, women perform better on a math and verbal task while the reverse effect is observed for men. The increase in female performance in response to higher temperature is significantly larger and more precisely estimated than the corresponding decrease in male performance. In contrast to math and verbal tasks, temperature has no impact on a measure of cognitive reflection for either gender. Our findings suggest that gender mixed workplaces may be able to increase productivity by setting the thermostat higher than current standards.

Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0216362 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 16362&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Battle for the thermostat: Gender and the effect of temperature on cognitive performance (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0216362

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0216362

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().