Michael Jackson entreated people not to “blame it on sunshine” in his 1978 hit Blame it on the Boogie, but scientific research suggests that his appeal was misguided. Decades of analysis has shown that warmer temperatures are a contributing factor in riots, road rage and the likelihood of Swedish bus drivers crashing.

Most of the significant riots in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s began as temperatures soared. Tensions that might have been contained spilled over into running battles. The Notting Hill riots of August 1976 began as thermometers recorded 19C (66F).

The Toxteth riots, in July 1981, the Brixton riots of September 1985 and the Handsworth riots in the same month all took place as temperatures reached 21C. Rioting returned to Toxteth during the heatwave of October 1985, when it was 27C.

The Oldham riots of 2001 began as the temperature at night was 18C.

Riots in America follow a similar pattern. Lance Workman, head of the Psychology Department at Bath Spa University College, has linked hot weather to levels of serotonin in the brain, which can cause aggression. “The majority of riots in the USA occur when temperature increases to between 27C and 32C,” he said.

“When the temperature goes over 32C, however, riots level off and begin to fall because people become so hot they can’t be bothered.”

Violent crimes including murder, rape and domestic violence are also more likely in the summer, research suggests. Murder rates in New York increased by 75 per cent in the hot summer of 1988. A 1983 study of 50,000 rapes by the US National Institute of Mental Health found that assaults peaked in July and August across all 16 locations studied.

Richard Michael, an American psychiatrist, found in 1986 that “violence by men toward women increases in summer independently of any major seasonal changes in the opportunity for contact between perpetrator and victim”.

Drivers are more likely to lose their temper in the heat of their cars. Doug-las Kenrich and Steven MacFarlane, a pair of British psychologists, found that there was a direct relationship between temperature and impatience among motorists. Their experiment involved pulling up at a set of traffic lights and failing to move when the lights turned green. As temperatures rose, the time taken for drivers to honk their horns diminished.

A Swedish psychologist at Uppsala University found that bus drivers were more likely to crash on hot days.