Key Points

A recent study revealed that bad weather during college admissions rounds reduces applications by up to 10%.

This effect disappears once students have chosen their college, so the damage is done right from the start.

Psychologists have a term for this phenomenon, and it has been affecting our lives for decades.

On a Saturday in late April, somewhere in America, a 16-year-old girl stands on a college campus with her dad, in the rain, mentally crossing a college off her list.

She won’t say its name or mention it. She won’t even realize she’s doing it. She’ll say, “I didn’t feel comfortable here,” or “It wasn’t right for me,” or “I see myself more at the other college.” She’ll never mention the rain. But months later, when it’s time to submit applications, that college won’t be on her list.

The rain will have voted for it.

I know this because researchers at Amherst College recently analyzed the data, and the results were surprising. Using eight years of orientation tour records from a prestigious northeastern university, researchers found that adverse weather conditions on the day of the tour significantly reduced the likelihood of a student applying. Extremely hot tours led to a 10% drop in applications, while rainy tours saw an 8% decrease. Even a cloudy tour resulted in a 5% reduction. If you grew up in a warm climate and attended a tour in cold weather, the effect was catastrophic: a nearly 15% decrease.

Imagine that. A life-altering decision, years in the making, concerning the next four years of a student’s life, significantly influenced by whether the sun shines for an hour on a random day.

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Then there’s an even stranger finding. Researchers tracked each orientation tour participant through the National Student Information Exchange to see which university they ultimately attended. They found that the weather effect, so strong during the application process, disappeared entirely during the admissions process. Same students, same university. But just as they received their acceptance letters and began choosing between options, a rainy Saturday in April arrived, and they could no longer influence the decision.

This meant the damage had already been done. It wasn’t the weather that determined the students’ university destinations, but rather which universities they would have a chance to compete for.

It’s all about ‘feeling.’

Researchers call this variable ‘feeling.’ They put it in quotation marks throughout the research, as if they themselves couldn’t believe they were studying it. Feeling is their shorthand for a student’s innate impression of whether they will succeed somewhere. It’s almost impossible to measure directly, so they used the weather as a proxy; a shocking emotional experience unrelated to school.

But feeling isn’t just a nice slang word. It’s a real mechanism, and its name is far less endearing.

In 1983, psychologists Norbert Schwartz and Gerald Clare conducted telephone interviews with strangers on sunny and rainy days, asking them how satisfied they were with their lives. Not the weather, but their entire lives. On sunny days, people were happier with everything: their marriages, their jobs, everything. On rainy days, their ratings were lower in every area.

Then they applied the version that made this result legendary. Before asking the crucial question, they asked an innocent one: By the way, what’s the weather like there?

The effect vanished! As soon as people noticed the weather, they ignored it. The weather no longer affected them.

Schwartz and Klure called this mechanism the “informational effect.” Their claim was clear: We don’t have a straightforward way of answering the big questions about ourselves, so we pick up on any nearby sensation and categorize it as data about what we’re looking at. Sunlight on our faces imprints on the school. Our wet socks imprint on the campus. Even our mood itself makes us feel where we are.

It turns out that the weather is just the version we can measure.

Men in Love on a Bridge

This isn’t a new phenomenon, nor is it limited to college selection.

In 1974, psychologists Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron conducted one of the greatest (though old) field experiments ever. They placed an attractive woman at the far end of a 230-foot-long swinging suspension bridge over the Capilano Valley in British Columbia. As the single men descended from the bridge, the woman handed them a short questionnaire and her phone number in case they had any questions. She did the same thing on a short, sturdy bridge over a nearby shallow stream. The same woman, the same questionnaire, the same phone number.

About half the men on the terrifying bridge called. On the low, sturdy bridge, almost no one did.

The men thought they were feeling attracted, but what they were actually experiencing was a deep abyss. Their hearts were pounding from the 230-foot fall, their breath was ragged from the wind, and their nervous systems were behaving just like ours. They attributed the pounding heartbeat to the face in front of them and gave it another name. Dutton and Aaron called this phenomenon “misinterpretation of arousal.” Simply put, we’re confusing the bridge with the person standing at its end.

And here’s what bothers me: Dutton and Aaron weren’t studying decision-making! They were studying attraction. If a swinging bridge could convince a grown man he was in love with a stranger, what could a sunny April day possibly convince you of?

Fifty years later, other researchers wrote the same sentence with a different accent. The weather isn’t the school. The bridge isn’t the person. The feeling you get in a room is rarely related to what you’re looking at.

And you do it all the time. We all do.

The Judgment You Didnt Make

Take a moment and reflect on the events of your year. I’ve been doing this for a week, and I don’t like what I’m discovering.

The job offer you turned down the morning your dog got sick. The second date you didn’t make after the restaurant that gave you food poisoning. The friend you stopped texting after a weekend of arguing with your partner about something completely unrelated. The apartment you fell in love with on an unbelievably beautiful afternoon. The presentation you thought was terrible because you didn’t sleep the night before, even though everyone told you it was amazing.

Whatever it was, it seemed obvious at the time. And that’s the frustrating part. The feeling of absolute clarity is the proof. When your nervous system has already made its judgment, your conscious mind doesn’t get a second opinion; it gets a judgment wrapped in personal preference.

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The Amherst Journal uses a word that keeps coming to mind: mistakes. From a decision-theory perspective, this happens when our choices differ from what we would want if we saw things clearly. The weather on a random day tells us nothing about the four years we’ll spend in school. The valley tells us nothing about the woman standing at the end of the bridge. A migraine tells us nothing about the candidate we’re going to interview.

But the filter works. And what it gives us is often noise disguised as crucial information.

How to Turn Off the Filter

The bottom line: We can’t turn this device off. The filter we’re using here is older than language and faster than thought. And it will keep working as long as you have a nervous system. So the goal isn’t to overcome it or think about it, but to observe it enough to distinguish between your own voice and a voice spoken on your behalf.

Three Little Things I’ve Started Doing Since Reading This:

Name ‘the state’: This is Schwartz and Klor’s daylight-visible talent. Once you name the surrounding state, you weaken. Before I make an important decision, I ask myself about my state. Not literally the weather, though sometimes I mean it. Have I slept? Have I eaten? Did I just finish a bad call? Is something else seeping into me? Usually, it’s enough to say it out loud, even if it’s just into the air.

The “Second Saturday” rule: Students who applied got another chance: a handout, a follow-up email, a late-night chat with a friend. Students who didn’t apply got a rainy April afternoon and called it done. I try not to let anything important depend on a single impression. Not a person, not a place, not a project. Give it another room, another day, another mood, and see if the feeling is still the same.

Revisiting the “missing things”: The filter always leaves its mark on what’s missing: people you didn’t contact, ideas you crossed off before you knew it, schools you didn’t revisit. About once a year, I’ll try to go back and look at the “missing things.” I won’t dwell on regrets, but I’ll see if I can detect the filter’s effect. Research indicates that you can do that most of the time.

What The Heaven Decrees For Us

Back to the girl in the square: she’ll return to her father’s car, slightly wet, slightly tired, and let the moment pass, as all teenagers do. By December, school will no longer be an option for her, and no one in her life will know if the rain was the reason.

This is the aspect of this research that still haunts me. Not the data itself—it’s striking in its own right—but how everything operates in a subtle way. An entire future shifts in a weekend in April, and no one records it; there’s nothing to record. The girl doesn’t know, the school doesn’t know, and the weather has moved to another country. It simply happened, and then it became what it was, and then it became the next four years of her life.

This is what we often overlook when we talk about free will. We like to think that our most important decisions are the product of careful consideration, a balancing act between values ​​and beliefs, a long and deliberate process that aligns our true selves with what we want. But much of what we call our lives is nothing more than a series of weather reports that we haven’t bothered to read.

So, whether you’re a parent heading to the schoolyard this week, or the kid getting soaked in the rain, here’s what I wish someone had told me: The weather isn’t the school, and the atmosphere isn’t the place. How you feel today is just that—today. And that applies to all of us.

Keep these words in mind, and always look up.