Morning People Are Less Ethical at Night | Hacker News Reader

Morning People Are Less Ethical at Night

blogs.hbr.org

27 pointsbane9 comments

Sounds more like 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."

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!

It's still interesting to ask, when fatigue sets in, what degradation looks like. When decisions still must get made, how are they made (differently). They are more instinctive, and out instincts are often selfish and vindictive, and sometimes honest (less mental effort than lying)

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

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.

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.

Less Ethical, or just more prone to calculation errors?

People do stupid stuff while tired... Shocker.

It's more than that; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7940762

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