Is there any relationship between moon phases (full moon) and a change in human behavior?
No. Most of what you hear about this is anecdotal information from emergency workers of one kind or another, but the statistics don’t seem to show any increase in troubles when the moon is full.
The only reason I can think for a full moon to affect society is that the nights are brighter, so more people are out at night. Now that we have streetlights and headlights, that is no longer much of an issue.
Sure there is- every full moon, people always seem to be talking about how weird other people are acting 
As Saltire said, though, people talking about the effects of the full moon seems to be the only actual effect
Arjuna34
I don’t know, but my wife’s a doctor, and she used to hate working on nights when there was a full moon (she doesn’t work nights anymore). According to her, full moons are legendary in the emergency rooms of hospitals, and no one likes to work them.
I may have some interesting info to share:
A few years ago a “Full Moon Study” took place in which psychologists compared
- Admissions rates for ten days before the full moon.
and
2)Rates ten days after a full moon.
Hypothesis: There will be an increase of admissions after a full moon.
Variables: Ofcourse the rate of admissions and the phases of the moon.
Conclusion: Well, the rate of admissions dropped in the time period after the full moon. But, that period of tim e happened to incllude a weekend, and typically admission rates drop on weekends.
The initial data was inaccurate.
So what I’m getting at, is that if one were to ever find an answer to this question, “Do the phases of the moon affect human behavior?”, it won’t be too soon, because one would still be constantly uncovering hidden variables, such as the admission rates during the weekend.
Well, as it happens, I have some of my very own hands-on research into this phenomenon. I work in a hospital and we had this very discussion sometime early last year. So, in the interest of science and because my job is usually not that jam-packed full of duties, I decided to start making records.
As it turns out, the number of people seen in our emergency room during the three day full moon run increases by an average of five more people seen than on “regular” nights. Most of these are MEs (mental evaluations). However, the number of admissions from the ER remains constant.
Our original hypothesis also included a guess that the number of babies born would increase during a full moon. However, as it turns out, there is a slight increase in the number of women who come into the birthing center but the number of babies born remains constant.
What is the point? I don’t know. I am only able to wager a guess that maybe it is all psychosomatic. At least, it appears that way with the labor/babies and the ER. I don’t know about the rest of the hospital.
word from the master…
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_337.html
A long time ago, someone in the computer department at my university posted a chart of frequency of service calls by date, in a long strip chart. Along with the calls data they plotted the phase of the moon. I was surprised to see the frequency of calls almost exactly followed the phase of the moon, with about a 2 day lag. Service calls peaked 2 days after the full moon. Every month. Like clockwork. I have no explanation, I don’t think the phase of the moon was connected to hardware problems, just maybe that around the full moon, people got irritable and fed up with existing problems.