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

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]