Morning person, or night owl? It matters

Marketplace: 

It can be hard to do the right thing, the ethical thing — especially if you’re tired.

That’s something Chuck Collins, a 38-year-old bouncer, knows all about. By day — or by afternoon, really, if you’ve got an eye on the clock — he’s a comic book artist. But come night, he’s standing post at the Bleecker Street Bar in Soho.

“I’ve gone to people and told them, ‘Look — listen, I’m too tired to deal with it right now,’ because at this point this is gone,” he says, pointing to his head. “You need to leave or something bad is going to happen to you.”

…

“We know that ethical decisions are taxing,” says Sunita Sah, a professor of business ethics at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. “We have limited cognitive resources and less self-control at certain times of the day.”

According to a new study authored by Sah, our ability to be ethical and to do ethical work lines up squarely with our chronotype, our sense of our own morning- or late-night-person-ness.

“And this is important because it means that people can be ethical at one point in time and unethical at another point in time,” Sah says. “The same person.”

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