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*Rheumatoid Arthritis
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Vol. 93, Issue 7, 2895-2896, April 2, 1996

Psychology
 On the belief that arthritis pain is related to the weather

Donald A. Redelmeier*,dagger and Amos TverskyDagger

* Department of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON Canada M5S 1A1; dagger  Division of Clinical Epidemiology, Wellesley Hospital Research Institute, Toronto, ON Canada M4Y 1J3; and Dagger  Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305

Contributed by Amos Tversky, December 12, 1995

There is a widespread and strongly held belief that arthritis pain is influenced by the weather; however, scientific studies have found no consistent association. We hypothesize that this belief results, in part at least, from people's tendency to perceive patterns where none exist. We studied patients (n = 18) for more than 1 year and found no statistically significant associations between their arthritis pain and the weather conditions implicated by each individual. We also found that college students (n = 97) tend to perceive correlations between uncorrelated random sequences. This departure of people's intuitive notion of association from the statistical concept of association, we suggest, contributes to the belief that arthritis pain is influenced by the weather.

0027-8424/96/932895-2/0
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