Moral dilemma? Sleep on it

Do you have a moral dilemma? Don’t decide in a hurry – instead, sleep on your decision and you’ll have a better answer in the morning. So say researchers from the University of Washington, the University of Oregon and John Hopkins University in America (mindfood.com, January/February 2015).

University researchers maintain that if you have a moral dilemma, a “big decision” then make sure you have a nap first. When people don’t get enough sleep their moral compass decreases and they either find it harder to solve moral dilemmas or their morality declines. The same person can have different moral responses depending on their level of sleep. It’s not just that different people have different responses to moral dilemmas, but the same person can have lapses of morality.

Researchers found a link between sleep and morality. Sleep seems to have an impact on people’s decision-making processes.

People in a laboratory study were randomly assigned a specific amount of sleep, and then woken by the researchers. The control group was assigned to have about seven hours of sleep. The treatment group was assigned to have around 4.5 hours – these were the partially-deprived sleep group. After their period of sleep researchers presented participants with moral dilemma scenarios. Participants were shown ethical violations and asked whether it was a moral issue or not.

Participants who were better rested were more able to identify issues of morality – that is, whether a scenario presented a moral dilemma to them. Sleep-deprived participants scored lower in moral awareness than the control group – they could not identify moral dilemmas.

In a follow-up, new participants were asked to monitor their own sleep. Participants then completed the same measure of moral awareness as the first study.

When individuals were low in sleep, moral awareness declined, and they scored low in moral dilemma problems. When the same individuals had a full night’s sleep – of about seven hours – their morality increased. They scored highly on moral dilemma problems. So often it may not be a simple case of being influenced by other people – it may be just a case of not enough sleep.

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