from Hacker News

Hot Temperature and High Stakes Performance [pdf]

by robg on 9/3/24, 6:45 PM with 10 comments

• by jiggawatts on 9/3/24, 10:16 PM

  Something I’ve noted about working from home is that I can simply turn up the air conditioning if needed to keep myself at what feels like an optimum temperature. I’ve heard of this effect of heat on decreased performance and thought it a sign of bad management leadership when I work at a customer site and it feels like a sauna. Especially in the IT field, they might be throwing away millions of dollars worth of lost productivity annually because they can’t be bothered adjusting a thermostat.

• by AnotherGoodName on 9/4/24, 12:17 AM

  I don’t think it’s the case here since the subjects would have been unaware of the observation but temperature to human performance metrics usually leads to a classic example of the Hawthorne effect where you’ll see an improvement in performance no matter which way you change the temperature simply because the participants are aware of the experiment.

  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

• by aredox on 9/3/24, 10:36 PM

  I think the US Air Force has some interesting studies on the effect of temperature on performance of pilots.