Thought-Provoking Thursday: Losing Sleep? You Might Be Losing Your Morals, Too

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Do you stay up late to respond to emails, go over meeting notes and prepare for team projects? While you might think your after-hours dedication makes you a good employee, a new study suggests the exact opposite might be true.

According to Christopher Barnes, an assistant management professor at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, losing sleep might be costing you the ability to behave ethically — in and out of the workplace.

“Given that the pre-frontal cortex plays a key role in executive functioning, or conscious decision making, lack of sleep may produce a diminished ability to make good decisions,” Barnes wrote in the study. And by “good decisions,” he doesn’t just mean “smart” decisions, like eating your vegetables. In a series of experiments, Barnes put participants through different kinds of tests in which they had to self-report their scores. Consistently, the participants who got less sleep were more likely to cheat and overreport their scores.

The kicker? These “cheaters,” the ones who lied to make it seem like they had gotten higher scores, only had 22 fewer minutes of sleep (on average) than their ethical counterparts.

“Even twenty minutes of sleep matters,” Barnes said in a recent phone interview. “Every minute you lose, you increase the risk that these bad things will happen, such as unethical behavior.”

Barnes says there’s no magic sleep number at which you’ll automatically start lying to your boss and stealing office supplies, but he noted that eight hours of sleep per night is still the recommended amount and six hours per night is the mark at which cognitive function (not to mention moral behavior) starts to decline.

“One study showed that a 6-minute nap produces benefits to your memory,” he said. “A lot of times we try to convince ourselves that missing sleep isn’t a big deal… but there’s a lot of literature to the contrary.

While the immediate implications of his research apply to the workplace — bosses shouldn’t be emailing workers at 3am any more than workers should be replying to those emails at 3am — Barnes noted that sleep deprivation could pervade your shopping habits, too.

“I think we can apply the principal to a context of retail negotiations. Anytime you’re engaged in a process of negotiation, you have to decide what information to share, or if you’re going to be honest about other potential offers you have,” he said. “You can promise a certain payment schedule knowing you’ll fail to meet that in order to get a certain deal. There are many opportunities to lie or be misleading, and those would all be vulnerable to [sleep deprivation] effects.”

It’s an effect, he noted, that can happen regardless of which side of the sale you’re on.

“When I considered selling my car and buying a new one, the transmission wasn’t working quite right. Do I disclose this or not?” he said. “Maybe if I were sleepier, I’d be more tempted to hold back on this information in order to get a better price.”