Why do we still believe in 'lunacy' during a Full Moon?

Authored by astronomy.com and submitted by clayt6

It’s sometimes called the “Transylvania effect.” In the dark sky, the clouds shift, revealing the Full Moon’s eerie silver gleam, and the people on Earth below go mad. It’s a story that gets repeated by doctors, teachers and police officers. The science, though, says something different.Blaming the Full Moon for strange behavior is a time-honored tradition. In the first century AD, the Roman philosopher Pliny suggested that the Full Moon caused more dew to form, which led to increased moisture in the brain, and that, he said, led to madness.The idea that the Full Moon makes people crazy didn’t go out of fashion along with togas, though—in the 1700s, a British legal expert and judge wrote, “A lunatic, or non compos mentis, is properly one who hath lucid intervals, sometimes enjoying his senses and sometimes not and that frequently depending upon the changes of the moon.” (The word lunatic, by the way, comes from the Latin luna: moon.)In the 1970s, a popular book posited that just as the Moon controls the tides, its gravitational pull affects the fluid sloshing around in human brains. Even today, you might hear stories about classrooms of students misbehaving and people getting hurt in freak accidents around the Full Moon. But there’s one big problem with all these theories: they’re not true.

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For decades, researchers have pored over hospital records and police blotters, and time and time again, they’ve come up with the same answer — the Full Moon doesn’t seem to be associated with more strange things happening than usual. No uptick in births, no synced up menstrual periods and no madness.“I’m not aware of a single replicated finding in the literature that there’s a link between the Full Moon and odd behavior,” says Scott Lilienfeld, a professor of psychology at Emory University. Often, studies that do make this claim don’t hold up to scrutiny. In one paper, researchers posited that there are more car crashes during the Full Moon. They later retracted it after realizing that many of those Full Moons were on weekends, when more people are on the road. But despite the lack of evidence, lots of people still believe that the Full Moon makes things… weird.But despite the lack of evidence, lots of people still believe that the Full Moon makes things… weird.

TheJoshWatson on August 22nd, 2019 at 00:27 UTC »

Since this article cites exactly zero sources, and only says, “here’s a quote from someone with a degree, and a vague reference to some science.”

Here is a real source (the National Institute of Health) which actually partially disagrees with this article. They conclude that there is some credible evidence behind crime and emergency room visits and the lunar cycle. But they also acknowledge that sometimes those correlations don’t seem to be present. They concluded that because there is conflicting evidence, there is definitely something worth investigating.

Admittance to hospitals and emergency units because of various causes (cardiovascular and acute coronary events, variceal hemorrhage, diarrhea, urinary retention) correlated with moon phases. In addition, other events associated with human behavior, such as traffic accidents, crimes, and suicides, appeared to be influenced by the lunar cycle.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/16407788/

frimpongdingdong on August 21st, 2019 at 23:09 UTC »

Just for the sake of argument, if you read the article they don’t cite the sample size at all, just describe it with adjectives. It could have been years of records but only in a few hospitals in centralized area, or only one hospital or maybe it was a nationwide study, we don’t know. She also framed it as if they were studying whether the moon had a direct effect on specefic events rather events rather than number of events as a whole, which you’d think would be more logical to check from a higher level standpoint. The author provided no source for their information and I’m too lazy to do their job for them and confirm, lazy writing honestly.

FollowTheLey on August 21st, 2019 at 19:41 UTC »

A popular theory is that the increased visibility during a full moon means people will be more active on these nights. Seemed plausible to me. Although, I'd never heard that theory associated with an increase in negative behavior(aside from superstition).