Cold Gum, Warmer Concern: Replication Tests Whether Bodily Temperature Shapes Climate Beliefs

A stick of chewing gum sounds like an unlikely instrument for probing one of the most pressing questions in climate psychology, but a new replication study suggests that the sensation of cold in the mouth can measurably shift how worried people say they are about global warming. The study, published in Current Psychology, set out to reproduce and extend a striking 2012 finding by Lewandowski and colleagues, who reported that embodied temperature—temperature sensations generated by the body itself—could heighten concern about climate change and intentions to act on it. The new research, led by Hannah Mariella Timmerbeil and colleagues at Hochschule Fresenius in Cologne and the University of Sustainability in Vienna, delivers a nuanced verdict: the effect survives, but only partially, and only in a specific kind of participant.

The idea behind the experiment rests on embodied cognition, a framework in cognitive science holding that thinking is not confined to the brain but is grounded in bodily states and sensorimotor experiences. According to this view, abstract concepts borrow their structure from concrete physical experience. Temperature is one of the most studied grounding dimensions: physical warmth has been linked to social trust and interpersonal closeness, while cold has been associated with alertness, psychological distance, and threat sensitivity. Because climate change is an abstract, temporally distant risk, researchers have long suspected that bodily cues—especially cold sensations, which mirror the literal subject matter of global cooling fears and physical threat—might make the risk feel more immediate and concerning.

In the original 2012 experiments, Lewandowski, Ciarocco, and Gately asked participants to chew temperature-inducing gum as part of what they believed was a taste test. Cinnamon-flavored gum produced sensations of warmth, mint-flavored gum produced sensations of cold, and control participants chewed flavorless gum. Those who felt cold reported greater concern about climate change, greater willingness to volunteer for an environmental organization, and a larger intended time commitment than controls. The findings were arresting, but they arrived from a discipline now wrestling with a well-documented replication crisis, and embodied cognition research has been singled out as an area particularly vulnerable to failures of reproduction. Machery’s recent assessment of the field catalogues how many classic embodiment effects have failed to hold up under stricter experimental controls, making an independent test of the gum effect scientifically important rather than merely curious.

The replication team introduced three methodological improvements designed to address the most obvious weaknesses of the original work. First, rather than relying solely on undergraduates—the famously unrepresentative ‘WEIRD’ population of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic societies—they recruited a community sample alongside a student sample, allowing them to test whether the effect generalizes beyond young, highly educated participants. Second, they added a bubble-gum condition, a flavor that carries temperature associations for some people but is far weaker than mint or cinnamon, to separate the effect of chewing itself from the effect of temperature-inducing flavors. Third, and critically, experimenters were blinded to which gum each participant had received, since evidence shows that unblinded experimenters can inflate effect sizes by unconsciously influencing participants or their own data recording.

The procedure mirrored the original study closely. All gums were white, identical in shape, and stored in sealed containers, and participants were told they were taking part in a taste test. A total of 116 people took part: 58 undergraduates with a mean age of about 21, and 58 community members with a mean age of about 37, roughly 41 percent of whom held a university degree. Participants were equally divided across the three flavor conditions and, while chewing, completed a ten-item survey measuring climate change risk perception, concern for social issues in general, willingness to volunteer for a climate organization, and the perceived temperature of the gum. Only after the session ended did the experimenter identify the flavor using a hidden marker inside the container.

The manipulation worked. Sixty-one percent of participants who chewed cinnamon gum reported feeling heat, compared with just 5 percent in the mint condition and 21 percent in the bubble-gum condition, while 57 percent of the mint group reported sensations of cold against 5 percent of the cinnamon group and 15 percent of the bubble-gum group. Importantly, perceived and actual room temperatures did not differ across conditions, ruling out ambient temperature as an alternative explanation. The stage was thus set for a clean test of whether the induced temperature sensations moved climate attitudes.

The headline result partially replicated the original study. Participants who chewed mint gum reported significantly greater concern about climate change than those who chewed bubble gum, with a small overall effect size. The effect was driven entirely by the undergraduate sample, where it was moderately strong, whereas the community sample showed no reliable difference across conditions. In a further echo of the original findings, gum flavor had no effect on concern about unrelated social issues, supporting the specificity of the manipulation—it was climate concern, not general negativity, that shifted. On pro-environmental behavior, participants in the mint condition were more willing to volunteer for a climate organization, with 48 percent expressing willingness compared with 26 percent in the cinnamon condition and 24 percent in the bubble-gum condition, a pattern that held across both samples.

Yet the replication also revealed sharp limits. Unlike the original study, the sensation of cold did not increase the number of hours participants said they would volunteer, a result that remained non-significant even after sensitivity analyses excluding extreme outliers. The authors interpret this gap between intention and commitment through the lens of the well-known attitude–behavior gap in environmental psychology: concern about climate change is only weakly correlated with actual pro-environmental behavior, a relationship complicated by factors such as learned helplessness, perceived inefficacy of mitigation responses, education, and entrenched habits. Theoretical models such as the Theory of Planned Behavior and Value-Belief-Norm theory emphasize motivational and normative pathways from belief to action, and the findings suggest that a fleeting bodily sensation may nudge attitudes without activating the deeper mechanisms required for sustained behavioral commitment.

Why did the effect appear only in undergraduates? The authors point to research showing that younger people are more responsive to contextual climate cues, reflecting their developmental stage, active identity exploration, and heavy exposure to climate discourse in education and media. For students, climate change is a salient identity issue, so a cold sensation may more readily connect bodily threat cues with an already-primed mental representation of climate risk. Older community members, whose beliefs are more crystallized and shaped by diverse life experiences, appear far less susceptible. The result carries an important warning for the field: embodied interventions may work only for narrow populations, and generalizing effects from student samples to the public at large—as much of psychology has traditionally done—is a hazardous enterprise. The relatively small subgroup sizes in the new study also temper confidence, underscoring the need for larger and more diverse samples in future work.

The study did not control for confounds such as prior climate concern, political ideology, or environmental literacy, all of which are known to shape climate beliefs, and the authors flag this as a priority for follow-up research. Still, the broader lessons are clear. Embodied temperature effects on climate concern are real but fragile, cold-specific, and demographically bounded. The work reinforces growing skepticism about the robustness of classic embodiment findings while demonstrating exactly the kind of methodological rigor—community samples, neutral control conditions, and blinded experimenters—that can distinguish durable effects from artifacts. For anyone hoping that a stick of mint gum could substitute for climate communication, the message is sobering: bodily sensations may open a small window of concern, but converting that feeling into lasting engagement requires motivational and efficacy-building strategies that no flavor can deliver.

Subject of Research: The influence of embodied temperature sensations, induced by chewing gum flavor, on climate change beliefs and behavioral intentions.

Article Title: Climate change as a matter of taste? The influence of gum flavor and embodied cognition on climate change beliefs. Replicating Lewandowski, et al. (2012)

Article References: Climate change as a matter of taste? The influence of gum flavor and embodied cognition on climate change beliefs. Replicating Lewandowski, et al. (2012). (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10047-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10047-2

Keywords: embodied cognition, climate change beliefs, chewing gum, replication study, embodied temperature, environmental psychology, attitude-behavior gap, risk perception, Current Psychology, experimenter blinding, undergraduate sample, climate concern