psychosomatic affect. People believe the full moon makes them do crazy shit, so they do crazy shit.

I don't know about people, but I work with dogs, and yes, the full moon does affect their behaviour. I don't know if there is any scientific study on that. Of course, I'm not suggesting it has to do with some woo. The coyotes on my property are definitely more active during the full moon because there's more light for them to hunt during the night.

The studies I've read show no effect. Another superstition.

Generally, the full moon is just more noticeable. When crazy stuff happens, as it does every day, people just tend to associate that they noticed the full moon with the crazy stuff on that particular day. The relationship is actually spurious. There is no real correlation.

The same thing happens when people are near graveyards. The sounds of nature which are everywhere tend to creep people out more often if they are in a graveyard.

Generally it is just making associations with what are unusual sights or locations.

There is also a bit of the placebo effect happening. Once a full moon has a reputation for crazy shit happening, people ten to do crazy shit around the full moon. Then they can dismiss their actions on the moon instead of taking responsibility for their own actions... and people will tend to accept their rationale.

I remember back in the 1960's iut was still acceptable to excuse bad behavior if a person was drunk. However they did studies, where they had people consume enough alcohol to get to the stage of a blackout, and they determined that people still retain their knowledge and awareness of right and wrong even when dunk to the point of blackout. So, law enforcement and the courts no longer gave otu lighter sentences if the person was drunk. People were held responsible for their actions, because they never lost awareness of knowing when they were doing wrong no matter how drunk they got.

OK. I got a bit off topic there. Anyway, the studies that appear to show crazy shit happening during a full moon, are almost always flawed in design (biased), or are naturally occurring outliers (an outlier is basically when you have enough studies, eventually one will provide abnormal results despite good design and procedures, which is why science demands replications of studies before they are considered to be valid. This is to insure that the study was nto just a statistical anomaly also known as an "outlier" ).

There's also a slight difference in gravitational pull. The sun and moon are on exact opposite sides of the earth.