Study finds morning people are “logical”, night owls are “creative”

I’m really not a morning person. But according to a new study, this tells you a lot about my personality: I’m more likely to be “creative”, “risk-taking”, “non-conformist” and “independent” than early risers.

This work came from the psychologist Juan Francisco Diaz-Morales, who recently decided to see if there were any regularities in the personality traits of early risers versus evening people. He took 360 undergraduates, ranked their relative sleep/wake habits, and then scaled them on the Millon Index of Personality Styles. According to the blog of the British Psychological Society, here’s what he found:

[Morning people] tend to be of a certain personality: they favour the tangible and concrete, they trust their experience and the observable over intuition and feelings; they have an attention to detail and a preference for logic. They are respectful of authority, care about social conventions and are rarely politically radical. [snip] In contrast to morning types, evening people preferred the symbolic over the concrete, were creative and risk-taking, and tended to be non-conformist and independent.

Assuming this finding holds water, it’d have some pretty interesting implications for the workplace, eh? A smart company would organize its workday to optimize tasks based on which type of person is needed for the job — a logic-crunching task versus a blue-skying brainstorm — and when they’re likely to be at their best.

Indeed, I’ve long suspected that the 9 to 5 schedule is kind of suboptimal for productivity; it’s patently clear that different people shine at different times in the day. And you could argue that — for white-collar work, at least — the time-delimited bounds of the workday are more up for grabs now than they’ve ever been. Historically, one big reason we settled on the 9 to 5 timeslot is for purposes of industrial efficiency: We needed people to be at their desks for roughly the same time period so they could work together. But email, mobile phones, and digital documents obviate a lot of those old-skool practical considerations. A lot of the rationale for 9 to 5 worktimes is now practically a phantom-limb phenomenon in corporate culture.

(Alas, the full study is behind a paywall, so I couldn’t read it, but here’s the official link.)

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