Our ability to exhibit self-control to avoid cheating or lying is significantly reduced over the course of a day, researchers have found.
"As ethics researchers, we had been running experiments examining various unethical behaviours, such as lying, stealing, and cheating," researchers Maryam Kouchaki of Harvard University and Isaac Smith of the University of Utah's David Eccles School of Business explained.
"We noticed that experiments conducted in the morning seemed to systematically result in lower instances of unethical behaviour," they said.
Knowing that self-control can be depleted from a lack of rest and from making repeated decisions, researchers examined whether normal activities during the day would be enough to deplete self-control and increase dishonest behaviour.
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Participants were not given money for getting correct answers, but were instead given money based on which side of the screen they determined had more dots; they were paid 10 times the amount for selecting the right over the left.
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.
They also tested participants' moral awareness in both the morning and afternoon.
After presenting them with word fragments such as "_ _RAL" and "E_ _ _ C_ _" the morning participants were more likely to form the words "moral" and "ethical," while the noon participants tended to form the words "coral" and "effects," lending further support to the morning morality effect.
The researchers found the same pattern of results after tests on a sample of online participants from across the US.
They also discovered 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. Those participants with a higher propensity to morally disengage were likely to cheat in both the morning and the afternoon.
The findings were published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.