

Morning People Are Less Ethical at Night - bane
http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/06/morning-people-are-less-ethical-at-night/

======
vellum
Sounds more like decision fatigue.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue)

Other examples:

- _If a trip to the supermarket induces more decision fatigue in the poor than in the rich — because each purchase requires more mental trade-offs — by the time they reach the cash register, they’ll have less willpower left to resist the Mars bars and Skittles. Not for nothing are these items called impulse purchases_

- _One research study found that the decisions judges make are strongly influenced by how long it has been since their last break. "We find that the percentage of favorable rulings drops gradually from ≈65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to ≈65% after a break."_

~~~
kijin
I marked thousands of papers as a TA in grad school. I was in the humanities,
so there was quite a bit of room for subjectivity in the marking. After a
while, I found that the average mark tended to go down toward the end of a
4-hour marking session. It could have been caused by decision fatigue. Or it
could have been irrational annoyance, i.e. first time: "Hmm, he made a minor
mistake here." 70th time: "Why on earth does everyone keep making such an
elementary mistake?" Anyway, I compensated by consciously giving out higher
marks toward the end.

Anyway, if I'm ever accused of a crime, I'll tell my lawyer to do whatever he
can to schedule a session shortly after lunchtime!

------
anigbrowl
tl;dr Tested using dice rolls, where perfectly ethical participants should
report an average score of 3.5. Night people are also less ethical in the
mornings (4.22), but not as unethical as morning people are at night (4.56).
Depressingly, average participants are still a bit dishonest during their
temporal 'comfort zones,' although the morning people (3.86) once again outdo
the evening people (3.8).

I've never trusted morning people and now I have evidence to validate my bias,
ha ha! /tongue in cheek

------
3pt14159
I feel like "roll this die and we'll pay you x * what you roll" isn't really a
test of ethics, since people know that that is the whole point of the
exercise. I think a real test of ethics would be something where the
participant doesn't even know that they are being tested, for example, telling
a participant that they are being hired for the day to collect parking
payments whilst unbeknownst to them they are secretly being recorded to see
what percent of the take they are holding back.

Something like that. Because honestly if someone told me that they were
testing my ethics I don't really know if I'd tell the truth, since it is the
whole nature of the exercise, but I'd never steal from a parking lot owner.

~~~
kijin
Experiments in human psychology are often conducted with en elaborate ruse to
hide the real purpose from the subjects. The infamous Milgram Experiment, for
example, was disguised as a test of the effectiveness of corporal punishment
on students or something like that. The real purpose was only revealed after
the experiment.

I don't know what kind of disguise they used with the dice experiment, but the
earlier version using matrix quizzes could be easily disguised as a test of
math skill relative to the time of day. (Subjects who are prone to cheat might
try to look smarter than they actually are, but this actually plays perfectly
into the researchers' goal!)

Fun project: Go to a large research university and look for flyers asking for
people to participate in psychology experiments. Read the description and try
to guess what those experiments are really about.

------
crpatino
Less Ethical, or just more prone to calculation errors?

------
joelmbell
People do stupid stuff while tired... Shocker.

~~~
nitrogen
It's more than that; see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7940762](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7940762)

