Preferences for Daylight Saving Time meet fundamentals of human physiology: correlations in the 2018 Public Consultation by the European Commission

Abstract

We search for correlations in the preferences for seasonal time arrangements across different countries. With this purpose we analyze the public consultation on summertime arrangements (Daylight Saving Time) launched by the European Commission in 2018 (the largest sample size study of this kind, 4.55 million replies). We also analyze the starting point of human activity in Europe from the Harmonized European Time Use Survey, also the largest scale survey to assess the budget of time in modern societies. We find that the shares of population willing to abolish the seasonal regulations of time increases with increasing latitudes and with earlier phases of human activity. Notably the phases are determined in relation to the winter sunrise, which drives the seasonal cycles of light and dark, and synchronizes human preferences. We provide a simple physiological rationale for this finding.