Lack Of Sleep Can Damage Your Moral Quotient

Morality and ethics are often given quite a high regard in our society. Yet, if research is to be believed, human beings, no matter how much they pride themselves on their moral quotient, tend to display inconsistency in their own ethical behaviors. Recent studies suggest that one of the reasons behind this aberration could be lack of sleep.

What is moral awareness?
Experts define moral awareness as a person's perception of a situation containing moral substance and his resolve towards justifiably regarding it from a moral standpoint.

Ethics research shows that moral awareness is important for a society to function well. In its absence, people may not be able to judge a person or a situation from a moral perspective. As a result, their actions may lack in moral thoughtfulness and promote unethical behaviors.

Recent studies have shed more light on the nature of moral awareness and revealed that it is actually a dynamic entity as opposed to something fixed and predetermined in people (much to the dismay of those who like to think of themselves as morally upright at all times). This means that the same person can show a lot of moral awareness at one point of time and come across as morally deprived at another.

This finding piqued the curiosity of researchers, who wanted to know the reasons behind these changing levels. Further studies highlighted that moral awareness, like all other forms of awareness, is dependent on a person's energy and self-control levels at a given point of time.

Being morally aware requires the ability to grasp the moral content in a scenario. This mental process needs attention, focus and the effort of thinking through the problem at hand. However, we know from previous scientific evidence that a lack of sleep adversely impacts a person's ability to think and focus.

This brings us to a logical question: Can sleep deprivation, thus, compromise an individual's moral awareness?

Lack of sleep can reduce your moral quotient, say a series of studies
To confirm or refute this hypothesis, researchers decided to conduct a series of three scientific studies.

In the first study, the sample pool of randomly assigned participants was divided into two sub-groups: the first set of volunteers comprised people who were partially sleep deprived (average of 4.35 hours of sleep) while the second set formed what was the control group - here the volunteers had had mean duration of 6.43 hours of sleep. Both the groups were made to read a situation that included some ethical violation, after which every participant was measured for their moral awareness levels. In sync with the hypothesis, it was found that the sleep-deprived participants had a lower moral awareness score when contrasted with the control group.

A second follow-up study had similar revelations to make. This time, adopting a different methodology, a group of participants (different from the first study) were monitored over four days, with focus on their natural sleep variations. Every day, a volunteer reported their sleep duration the night before, followed by the reading of one of the four ethical scenarios, and finally undertaking an assessment of their moral awareness level. Once again, it was found that on days when a given participant was sleep deprived, he showed lower levels of moral awareness as compared to the days when he was adequately rested.

The third study adopted a completely different approach. Its basis was the sleep loss that resulted from the spring change to daylight saving time. Earlier studies had shown that on Monday, following the change to daylight saving time, people got about 40 minutes shorter sleep as compared to normal nights. Therefore, the study looked at comparing moral awareness levels on that 'sleepy' Monday with the Mondays that just preceded and succeeded it.

The measurement was based on monitoring Internet searches during these Mondays, using Google Trends to track the uppermost thoughts in the minds of the people. The research team put together a list of words that are often linked with morality. Then the Internet searches of these three Mondays were examined to find out the frequency of these morality associated words. A similar examination was carried out for Google's general search categories to determine changes, if any, in general search behaviors of people.

The findings clearly indicated a dip in moral searches on the 'sleepy' Monday without any corresponding dip in the general search categories. This was, once again, consistent with the findings of the previous two studies and clearly underscored the fact that sleep deprivation was indeed associated with a lowered level of moral awareness.

Insight stemming from these studies
While each of the three studies did have its limitations of scope, reach and applicability, there's a certain consistency in the findings, in spite of the varied methodologies adopted to reach the respective results - lack of sleep does compromise a person's moral awareness.

This insight is vital from the point of view of not just morality, but also from the perspective of the problems that sleep deprivation can wreck on people.

We've all been aware of issues of poor concentration, low focus, short attention spans, and higher accidents that are linked with sleep inadequacy; however, these studies present a whole new angle to the consequences of the urban epidemic of sleep deprivation.

The understanding is also crucial because it highlights that low moral awareness is not just limited to a reduced appreciation of the moral components in one's own behavior, but also in the choices that are made by others.