14 DAY TRIAL // People are more likely to lie, cheat, steal and engage in other unethical behaviors in the afternoon than they are in the early hours of the day, a new paper in the journal Psychological Science argues.
The paper is authored by researchers Maryam Kouchaki with the Harvard University and Isaac Smith with the University of Utah, and basically states that, the more hours pass from any given day, the less capable of self-control individuals get.
More precisely, the specialists argue that, as the day progresses, people have trouble keeping their behavior in check and are therefore more likely to give into temptations that have little to do with ethics and morality.
Maryam Kouchaki and Isaac Smith first figured out that something is off with most people's sense of morality in the afternoon while carrying out experiments intended to shed light on various unethical behaviors.
“As ethics researchers, we had been running experiments examining various unethical behaviors, such as lying, stealing, and cheating. We noticed that experiments conducted in the morning seemed to systematically result in lower instances of unethical behavior,” the specialists explain.
The researchers decided to further research this phenomenon, and rolled out a brand new series of experiments, EurekAlert reports.
Thus, they asked several volunteers to count dots appearing on the left and on the right side of a screen, and offered them 10 times more money when the right side was the one displaying the most dots than they did when the left side was the “winner.”
The volunteers did not take long to figure out that saying that the right side displayed more dots worked to their advantage, and were more likely to make use of this piece of information during the late hours of the day.
Specifically, it was around this time when the people who took part in this experiment were found to be more likely to cheat and say that they had counted more dots on the right side, even if that was not the case.
What's more, it appears that, bright and early in the morning, most of the volunteers formed the words “MORAL” and “ETHICAL” starting from the structures “_ _RAL” and “E_ _ _ C_ _.” Later in the day, however, they formed the words “CORAL” and “EFFECTS.”
“Our findings suggest that mere time of day can lead to a systematic failure of good people to act morally,” the researchers commented on their findings.
“Whether you are personally trying to manage your own temptations, or you are a parent, teacher, or leader worried about the unethical behavior of others, our research suggests that it can be important to take something as seemingly mundane as the time of day into account,” they added.
The only question that remains unanswered is whether the researchers wrote their paper early in the day, or in the afternoon. Just so regular folks can know whether or not they should take this information with a grain of salt.