Does holding a warm drink really make strangers seem friendlier?
Show answer & explanation
Answer: Probably not: larger repeat studies found no effect
Probably not: larger repeat studies found no effect ✓ — A famous 2008 study reported that people holding a hot coffee rated a stranger as warmer than people holding an iced one, and it became a textbook example of the body shaping the mind. When other labs repeated it with far more participants, in 2014 and again in a large multi-site project, the effect vanished. That does not prove it is impossible, but it means the original result was most likely noise, and the finding is now a case study in why one small experiment needs replication before it becomes a fact.
Yes, warmth releases dopamine that brightens every judgement — Dopamine was not even the mechanism the original paper proposed; it argued that the brain's sense of physical warmth spills over into social warmth. Either way, the larger replications did not find the effect.
Yes, but only with caffeinated drinks — Caffeine was never part of the design. The original comparison was hot versus iced coffee, and later tests used warm and cold pads. None of the larger replications found an effect with any drink.
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