Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
SALT LAKE CITY — A Utah researcher says people are more likely to lie, cheat and steal in the afternoon than they are in the morning. The new study is called the "morning morality effect."
Many of us have probably experienced that big drop off in energy in the afternoon, but our productivity isn't the only thing that diminishes in the afternoon. The new study finds it could also be our ability to tell the truth.
University of Utah doctoral student, Isaac Smith, researches business ethics, and co-authored the study. He said the study found that the will power normally keeping us from cheating and lying tends to break down when we get tired.
"It's a phenomenon we identified where people tend to be more moral in the morning than they do in the afternoon," Smith said. "By afternoon, they're less likely to exert self-control, and more likely to succumb to temptations."
In this study, Smith and his co-author showed undergrad students a hundred different variations of a pattern of dots. Then the subjects were asked if there were more dots on the left side or on the right side.
About half the time it was hard to tell which side had more dots, but many times the difference in the dots was obvious.
"Some were clearly more dots on the right, some were clearly more dots on the left," Smith said.
But the researchers gave the subjects an incentive to cheat. The subjects were told ahead of time they would get paid ten times as much money — we're talking nickels here — for choosing the right side over the left.
"People would deliberately say there were more dots on the right, when indeed there were clearly more dots on the left, more often in the afternoon than in the morning," Smith said.
Smith said two more experiments were conducted online that backed up the findings in his lab study.
Another finding of the study was that it's not necessarily the people who were naturally inclined to be deceitful who succumbed to the "morning morality effect" more often — it was the people who are fundamentally honest.
"Any important, ethically relevant decision — if your fatigued, you're sleep deprived or if you've had a long course of decisions throughout the day — it may be good to put that decision off," Smith said.
