WHY NIGHT OWLS ARE MORE ETHICAL IN THE AFTERNOON

Fast Company:

Whether you are a morning person or a night owl might dictate what time of day you should make your ethics-testing decisions.

It turns out the time of day you feel least productive and alert is also when you’re most likely to lie. A new study by Christopher M. Barnes of the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, Brian Gunia of Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School, and Sunita Sah of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, shows morning people become more unethical at night, while night owls are more unethical during the day.

The full report will be published in Psychological Science later this year, but the researchers posted their findings in a Harvard Business Review blog post.

The researchers wanted to follow up on a previous study on the “morning morality effect” that asked whether people are more moral in the morning than the afternoon and concluded that the day’s events depleted our self-control and our capacity to resist moral temptations, causing us to become liars and cheaters later in the day.

Read the whole story: Fast Company