We associate "warmth" with kindness. A warm person is someone generous, someone you'd like to talk to. This isn't something abstract - we associate physical warmth with emotional kindness : if you're holding a hot cup of coffee, you're more likely to see the person in front of you as an emotionally "warm" person than if you were looking at that person with an iced coffee in your hand. The cognitive linguist George Lakoff attributes this to the fact that most of our warm experiences as children involved being held by our parents. Our group declaring our faith in one another before heading out to the action But perhaps our early experiences with warmth have mislead us about what to expect from people when temperatures start to rise. Here's what heat does, when it's not making us trust those around us more: It increases violent crime . Studies in New York alone have found a positive correlation between ice cream sales and murder rates . Crimes