People used to think that the moon exerted a powerful effect on human behaviour. But nobody believes that any more… right? 🌙 StuartJRitchie
in August, where the moon is at its closest to the Earth and looks impressively enormous in the sky.
And indeed, when the meta-study authors ran a proper statistical test that accounted for the many different rolls of the dice, there was no longer any evidence of a lunar effect on homicides in that study. Homicide, suicide, and psychiatric conditions are one thing, but there’s a less dramatic supposed lunar effect that’s also, it seems, commonly believed: the effect on sleep.
The authors argue that, far from being false positives, a lot of the research has in fact produced false: missing effects that are really there. That’s because whereas some people might have their behaviour affected by one aspect of the moon’s cycle, like the cycle of full moon to full moon others might be more affected by theThe supermoon near the Graves Lighthouse in Massachusetts Bay, US