Self-control that helps us resist cheating or lying wears down as a day goes on, making people more likely to tell the truth in the morning compared to later in the day, according to a new study.
A Harvard University study shows that time could be correlated with honesty. Based on the study, self-control needed to tell the truth fades throughout the day as a person grows tired. Lying becomes easier even for someone who is a typically honest person, My Fox Philly reported.
In fact, the research shows that the most honest people may be the most susceptible to that effect, the researchers wrote, explaining their findings.
"We had been running experiments examining various unethical behaviors, such as lying, stealing, and cheating," researchers Maryam Kouchaki of Harvard University and Isaac Smith of the University of Utah said in a press release. "We noticed that experiments conducted in the morning seemed to systematically result in lower instances of unethical behavior."
In the first experiment, college-age participants were shown various patterns of dots on a computer. For each pattern, they were asked to identify whether more dots were displayed on the left or right side of the screen.
According to World Science, participants weren't paid for getting correct answers, but were instead paid based on which side of the screen they said had more dots; they were paid 10 times more for picking the right over the left.
This means participants therefore had a financial incentive to select the right, even if there were unmistakably more dots on the left, which would be a case of clear cheating.
Participants tested between 8 a.m. and noon were less likely to cheat than those tested between noon and 6 p.m., the researchers found. This phenomenon is called the "morning morality effect."
A second experiment tested if respondents could be primed with words related to morals. For example, word completion tasks like E_ _ _C_ _ and _ _ RAL were shown. People in the morning were more likely to see ETHICAL and MORAL, whereas people in the afternoon tended to see neutral words like EFFECTS and CORAL.
Researchers also found that the extent to which people behave unethically without feeling guilt or distress-known as moral disengagement-made a difference in how strong the morning morality effect was, My Fox Philly reported.
Participants with a higher propensity to morally disengage were likely to cheat in both the morning and the afternoon, they found. But people who had a lower propensity to morally disengage-those who might be expected to be more ethical in general-were honest in the morning, but less so in the afternoon.
