Data from the Human Penguin Project, a cross-national dataset testing social thermoregulation principles

Abstract

In the Human Penguin Project (N = 1755), 15 research groups from 12 countries collected body temperature, demographic variables, social network indices, seven widely-used psychological scales and two newly developed questionnaires (the Social Thermoregulation and Risk Avoidance Questionnaire (STRAQ-1) and the Kama Muta Frequency Scale (KAMF)). They were collected to investigate the relationship between environmental factors (e.g., geographical, climate etc.) and human behaviors, which is a long-standing inquiry in the scientific community. More specifically, the present project was designed to test principles surrounding the idea of social thermoregulation, which posits that social networks help people to regulate their core body temperature. The results showed that all scales in the current project have sufficient to good psychometrical properties. Unlike previous crowdsourced projects, this dataset includes not only the cleaned raw data but also all the validation of questionnaires in 9 different languages, thus providing a valuable resource for psychological scientists who are interested in cross-national, environment-human interaction studies.

Fig. 1

The general flow of the survey. Participants first read the instructions and informed consent, after agreed to proceed, they filled out the questionnaire battery, and measured their oral temperature before and after these questionnaires. For both oral temperature measurements, they submitted a photo of their thermometer (and wrote down measurement (1 or 2) and the date).