Hello PracticalCook. While all three factors you mentioned can influence how dough behaves in the oven, the single most common reason cookies stay in tight, solid balls is having too much flour in the mixture.
When measuring flour by volume with a cup rather than by weight on a kitchen scale, the flour easily becomes compacted. Scooping directly from the bag can unintentionally add twenty to thirty percent more flour than a recipe requires. This excess starch absorbs all available fats and liquids, leaving the dough too dry and stiff to melt and spread across the baking sheet.
Cold butter can certainly delay spreading, as solid fat takes longer to melt, but on its own, it usually results in thicker cookies rather than balls that do not spread at all. Your baking temperature of 180 degrees Celsius is the standard setting for most cookie recipes. If the oven were running excessively hot, it might set the outer structure before the core had time to expand, but at 180 degrees, heat alone is rarely the sole culprit.
A few other factors can also contribute, such as under-creaming the butter and sugar, reducing the sugar content (sugar melts in heat and drives the spread), or omitting baking soda, which raises the pH and encourages dough expansion.
For your next batch, I recommend weighing your flour using a digital kitchen scale (one cup of all-purpose flour is generally around 120 to 125 grams). If you measure by volume, fluff the flour with a fork first, spoon it gently into the cup, and sweep the top level with a knife. Ensuring your butter is properly softened to room temperature before creaming will also make a noticeable difference.
