Among animals, natural selection has resulted in a broad array of behavioral strategies to maintain core body temperature in a relatively narrow range. These strategies include social thermoregulation, the use of con-specifics to warm the body through activities like huddling. We suspected that the same selection pressures that apply to other animals also apply to humans, producing individual differences in the tendency to socially thermoregulate that should shape other aspects of personality. We conducted an exploratory, hypothesis-generating cross-sectional project to examine associations between thermoregulation and personality. We used conditional random forests in a training segment of our dataset to identify clusters of variables most likely to be shaped by individual differences to thermoregulate. We used the resulting clusters to fit hypothesis-generating mediation models. We will test the replicability of these models in both a test segment of our dataset and in a new replication dataset of 439 French students [concluding sentence to be added when the new data are analyzed. Concluding sentence will be modest on causal inferences and include “Constraints on Generality”]
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