Moral Time: Does Our Internal Clock Influence Moral Judgments?

Does morality depend on the time of the day? The study "The Morning Morality Effect: The Influence of Time of Day on Unethical Behavior" published in October of 2013 by Maryam Kouchaki and Isaac Smith suggested that people are more honest in the mornings, and that their ability to resist the temptation of lying and cheating wears off as the day progresses. In a series of experiments, Kouchaki and Smith found that moral awareness and self-control in their study subjects decreased in the late afternoon or early evening.  The researchers also assessed the degree of "moral disengagement", i.e. the willingness to lie or cheat without feeling much personal remorse or responsibility, by asking the study subjects to respond to questions such as "Considering the ways people grossly misrepresent themselves, it's hardly a sin to inflate your own credentials a bit" or "People shouldn't be held accountable for doing questionable things when they were just doing what an authority figure told them to do" on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Interestingly, the subjects who strongly disagreed with such statements were the most susceptible to the morning morality effect. They were quite honest in the mornings but significantly more likely to cheat in the afternoons. On the other hand, moral disengagers, i.e. subjects who did not think that inflating credentials or following questionable orders was a big deal, were just as likely to cheat in the morning as they were in the afternoons.

Understandably, the study caused quite a bit of ruckus and became one of the most widely discussed psychology research studies in 2013, covered widely by blogs and newspapers such as the Guardian "Keep the mornings honest, the afternoons for lying and cheating" or the German Süddeutsche Zeitung "Lügen erst nach 17 Uhr" (Lying starts at 5 pm). And the findings of the study also raised important questions: Should organizations and businesses take the time of day into account when assigning tasks to employees which require high levels of moral awareness?  How can one prevent the "moral exhaustion" in the late afternoon and the concomitant rise in the willingness to cheat?  Should the time of the day be factored into punishments for unethical behavior? 

One question not addressed by Kouchaki and Smith was whether the propensity to become dishonest in the afternoons or evenings could be generalized to all subjects or whether the internal time in the subjects was also a factor. All humans have an internal body clock – the circadian clock- which runs with a period of approximately 24 hours. The circadian clock controls a wide variety of physical and mental functions such as our body temperature, the release of hormones or our levels of alertness. The internal clock can vary between individuals, but external cues such as sunlight or the social constraints of our society force our internal clocks to be synchronized to a pre-defined external time which may be quite distinct from what our internal clock would choose if it were to "run free". Free-running internal clocks of individuals can differ in terms of their period (for example 23.5 hours versus 24.4 hours) as well as the phases of when individuals would preferably engage in certain behaviors. 

Some people like to go to bed early, wake up at 5 am or 6 am on their own even without an alarm clock and they experience peak levels of alertness and energy before noon. In contrast to such "larks", there are "owls" among us who prefer to go to bed late at night, wake up at 11 am, experience their peak energy levels and alertness in the evening hours and like to stay up way past midnight. It is not always easy to determine our "chronotype" – whether we are "larks", "owls" or some intermediate thereof – because our work day often imposes its demands on our internal clocks. Schools and employers have set up the typical workday in a manner which favors "larks", with work days usually starting around 7am – 9am. In 1976, the researchers Horne and Östberg developed a Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire to investigate what time of the day individuals would prefer to wake up, work or take a test if it was entirely up to them. They found that roughly 40% of the people they surveyed had an evening chronotype! If Kouchaki and Smith's findings that cheating and dishonesty increases in the late afternoons applies to both morning and evening chronotype folks, then the evening chronotypes ("owls") are in a bit of a pickle. Their peak performance and alertness times would overlap with their propensity to be dishonest. 

The researchers Brian Gunia, Christopher Barnes and Sunita Sah therefore decided to replicate the Kouchaki and Smith study with one major modification: They not only assessed the propensity to cheat at different times of the day, they also measured the chronotypes of the study participants. Their recent paper ""The Morality of Larks and Owls: Unethical Behavior Depends on Chronotype as Well as Time of Day" confirms that Kouchaki and Smith findings that the time of the day influences honesty, but the observed effects differ among chronotypes. After assessing the chronotypes of 142 participants (72 women, 70 men; mean age 30 years), the researchers randomly assigned them to either a morning session (7:00 to 8:30 am) or an evening session (12:00 am to 1:30 am). The participants were asked to report the outcome of a die roll; the higher the reported number, the more raffle tickets they would receive for a large prize, which served as an incentive to inflate the outcome of the roll. Since a die roll is purely random, one would expect that reported average of the die roll results would be similar across all groups if all participants were honest. 

Their findings: Morning people ("larks") tended to report higher die-roll numbers in the evening than in the morning – thus supporting the Kouchaki and Smith results- but evening people tended to report higher numbers in the morning than in the evening. This means that the morning morality effect and the idea of "moral exhaustion" towards the end of the day cannot be generalized to all. In fact, evening people ("owls") are more honest in the evenings. 

 Not so fast, say Kouchaki and Smith in a commentary published to together with the new paper by Gunia and colleagues. They applaud the new study for taking the analysis of daytime effects on cheating one step further by considering the chronotypes of the participants, but they also point out some important limitations of the newer study. Gunia and colleagues only included morning and evening people in their analysis and excluded the participants who reported an intermediate chronotype, i.e. not quite early morning "larks" and not true "owls". This is a valid criticism because newer research on chronotypes by Till Roenneberg and his colleagues at the University of Munich has shown that there is a Gaussian distribution of chronotypes. Few of us are extreme larks or extreme owls, most of us lie on a continuum. Roenneberg's approach to measuring chronotypes looks at the actual hours of sleep we get and distinguishes between our behaviors on working days and weekends because the latter may provide a better insight into our endogenous clock, unencumbered by the demands of our work schedule. The second important limitation identified by Kouchaki and Smith is that Gunia and colleagues used 12 am to 1:30 am as the "evening condition". This may be the correct time to study the peak performance of extreme owls and selected night shift workers but ascertaining cheating behavior at this hour is not necessarily relevant for the general workforce. 

Neither the study by Kouchaki and Smith nor the new study by Gunia and colleagues provide us with a definitive answer as to how the external time of the day (the time according to the sun and our social environment) and the internal time (the time according to our internal circadian clock) affect moral decision-making. We need additional studies with larger sample sizes which include a broad range of participants with varying chronotypes as well as studies which assess moral decision-making not just at two time points but also include a range of time points (early morning, afternoon, late afternoon, evening, night, etc.). But the two studies have opened up a whole new area of research and their findings are quite relevant for the field of experimental philosophy, which uses psychological methods to study philosophical questions. If empirical studies are conducted with human subjects then researchers need to take into account the time of the day and the internal time and chronotype of the participants, as well as other physiological differences between individuals. 

 The exchange between Kouchaki & Smith and Gunia & colleagues also demonstrates the strength of rigorous psychological studies. Researcher group 1 makes a highly provocative assertion based on their data, researcher group 2 partially replicates it and qualifies it by introducing one new variable (chronotypes) and researcher group 1 then analyzes strengths and weaknesses of the newer study. This type of constructive criticism and dialogue is essential for high-quality research. Hopefully, future studies will be conducted to provide more insights into this question. By using the Roenneberg approach to assess chronotypes, one could potentially assess a whole continuum of chronotypes – both on working days and weekends – and also relate moral reasoning to the amount of sleep we get. Measurements of body temperature, hormone levels, brain imaging and other biological variables may provide further insight into how the time of day affects our moral reasoning. 

 Why is this type of research important? I think that realizing how dynamic moral judgment can be is a humbling experience. It is easy to condemn the behavior of others as "immoral", "unethical" or "dishonest" as if these are absolute pronouncements. Realizing that our own judgment of what is considered ethical or acceptable can vary because of our internal clock or the external time of the day reminds us to be less judgmental and more appreciative of the complex neurobiology and physiology which influence moral decision-making. If future studies confirm that the internal time (and possibly sleep deprivation) influences moral decision-making, then we need to carefully rethink whether the status quo of forcing people with diverse chronotypes into a compulsory 9-to-5 workday is acceptable. Few, if any, employers and schools have adapted their work schedules to accommodate chronotype diversity in human society. Understanding that individualized work schedules for people with diverse chronotypes may not only increase their overall performance but also increase their honesty might serve as another incentive for employers and schools to recognize the importance of chronotype diversity among individuals. 

 References: 

 Brian C. Gunia, Christopher M. Barnes and Sunita Sah (2014) "The Morality of Larks and Owls: Unethical Behavior Depends on Chronotype as Well as Time of Day", Psychological Science (published online ahead of print on Oct 6, 2014). 

 Maryam Kouchaki and Isaac H. Smith (2014) "The Morning Morality Effect: The Influence of Time of Day on Unethical Behavior", Psychological Science 25(1) 95–102. 

Till Roenneberg, Anna Wirz-Justice and Martha Merrow. (2003) "Life between clocks: daily temporal patterns of human chronotypes." Journal of Biological Rhythms 18:1: 80-90.   

 Note: An earlier version of this article was first published on the 3Quarksdaily blog.   


Gunia, B., Barnes, C., & Sah, S. (2014). The Morality of Larks and Owls: Unethical Behavior Depends on Chronotype as Well as Time of Day Psychological Science, 25 (12), 2272-2274 DOI: 10.1177/0956797614541989

The Psychology of Procrastination: How We Create Categories of the Future

"Do not put your work off till tomorrow and the day after; for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn, nor one who puts off his work: industry makes work go well, but a man who puts off work is always at hand-grips with ruin."                          

                                                              Hesiod in "The Works and Days"



Paying bills, filling out forms, completing class assignments or submitting grant proposals – we all have the tendency to procrastinate. We may engage in trivial activities such as watching TV shows, playing video games or chatting for an hour and risk missing important deadlines by putting off tasks that are essential for our financial and professional security. Not all humans are equally prone to procrastination, and a recent study suggests that this may in part be due to the fact that the tendency to procrastinate has a genetic underpinning. Yet even an individual with a given genetic make-up can exhibit a significant variability in the extent of procrastination. A person may sometimes delay initiating and completing tasks, whereas at other times that same person will immediately tackle the same type of tasks even under the same constraints of time and resources. A fully rational approach to task completion would involve creating a priority list of tasks based on a composite score of task importance and the remaining time until the deadline. The most important task with the most proximate deadline would have to be tackled first, and the lowest priority task with the furthest deadline last. This sounds great in theory, but it is quite difficult to implement. A substantial amount of research has been conducted to understand how our moods, distractability and impulsivity can undermine the best laid plans for timely task initiation and completion. The recent research article "The Categorization of Time and Its Impact on Task Initiation" by the researchers Yanping Tu (University of Chicago) and Dilip Soman (University of Toronto) investigates a rather different and novel angle in the psychology of procrastination: our perception of the future.

Tu and Soman hypothesized that one reason for why we procrastinate is that we do not envision time as a linear, continuous entity but instead categorize future deadlines into two categories, the imminent future and the distant future. A spatial analogy to this hypothesized construct is how we categorize distances. A city located at a 400 kilometer distance may be considered as being spatially closer to us if it is located within the same state than another city which may be physically closer (e.g. only 300 kilometers away) but located in a different state. The categories "in my state" and "outside of my state" therefore interfere with the perception of the actual physical distance.

 In an experiment to test their time category hypothesis, the researchers investigated the initiation of tasks by farmers in a rural community in India as part of a larger project aimed at helping farmers develop financial literacy and skills. The participants (n=295 male farmers) attended a financial literacy lecture. The farmers learned that they would receive a special financial incentive if they opened a bank account, completed the required paperwork and accumulated at least 5,000 rupees in the account within the next 6 months. The farmers were also told they could open an account with zero deposit and complete the paperwork immediately while a bank representative was present at the end of the lecture. Alternatively, they could open the bank account at any point in time later by going to the closest branch of the bank. These lectures were held in June 2010 as well as in July 2010. In both cases, the six-month deadline was explicitly stated as being in December 2010 (for the June lectures) and in January 2011 (for the July lectures). The researchers surmised that even though the farmers were given the same six-month period to open the account and save the money, the December 2010 deadline would be perceived as the imminent future or an extension of the present because it fell in the same calendar year (2010) as the lecture, whereas the January 2011 deadline would be perceived as a far-off date in the distant future because it would fall in the next calendar year.

The results of this experiment were quite astounding: 32% of the farmers with the December 2010 deadline immediately opened the bank account whereas only 8% of the farmers with the January 2011 deadline followed suit. The contrast was even starker when it came to actually completing the whole task and saving the required money. 28% of the farmers with the December 2010 deadlines succeeded whereas only 4% of the farmers with the January 2011 deadline were successful. Even though both groups were given the same timeframe to complete the task (exactly six months) the same-year group had a six-to-seven fold higher success rate! To test whether their idea of time categorization into the "like-the-present" future and the distant future could be generalized, the researchers conducted additional studies with students at the University of Toronto and the University of Chicago. These experiments yielded similar results, but also revealed that the distinction between "like-the-present" and the distant future is not only tied to the end of the calendar year but can also occur at the end of the month. Participants who were asked in April to complete a task with a deadline on  April 30^th indicated a far greater willingness to initiate the task than those with a deadline of May 1^st, presumably because the April group thought of the deadline being an extension of the present (the month of April).

One of the most interesting experiments in their set of studies was the investigation of whether one could tweak the temporal perception of a deadline by providing visual cues which link the future date to the present.  Tu and Soman conducted the study on March 9, 2011 (a Wednesday) and told participants that the study was about judging actions. The text provided to the participants read, "Any action can be described in many ways; however the appropriateness of these descriptions may largely depend on the occasion on which the action occurs. In today's study, we are interested in your judgment of the appropriateness of descriptions of several actions. Please pick the one that you think is most appropriate in the occasion that is given to you in this study."

 The researchers then showed the participants a calendar of March 2011 and told them that all the given actions would occur on March 13, 2011 (a Sunday).  But the participants were divided into two groups, half of whom received a calendar in which the whole week was highlighted in one color, thus emphasizing that the Sunday deadline belonged to the same week ("like-the-present group"). The control group received a standard calendar in which the week-ends were colored differently from working days. The participants were provided with a list of 25 tasks and given two options for how they would describe each task. The two options reflected either a hands-on implementation approach versus more abstract approach. For example, for the task of "Caring for houseplants", they could choose between the hands-on option "Watering plants" or the more abstract option "Making the room look nice". Participants who saw the calendar in which the whole week (including Sunday) was depicted in the same color were significantly more likely to choose implementation options, suggesting that the visual cue was prepping their mind to think in terms of already implementing the tasks.

 The work by Tu and Soman makes a strong case for the idea that we think of the future in categories and that this has a major impact on our tendency to procrastinate and take charge and expediently initiate and complete tasks. However, the work does have some limitations such as the fact that the researchers did not investigate whether the initial categorization is modified over time and whether specific reminders can help change the categorization. For example, if the farmers with the January 2011 deadline were to be approached again in the beginning of January 2011, would they then re-evaluate the "remote future" deadline and now consider it to be a "like-the-present" deadline that needs to be addressed immediately? Another limitation of the research article is that it does not explicitly state the ethical review of the studies, such as whether the farmers in India knew that their data was being used for a behavioral research study and whether provided informed consent.

 This research provides fascinating insights into the science of procrastination and raises a number of important questions about how one should set deadlines. If the deadline is too far in the future, there is a much greater likelihood of thinking of it as a remote entity which may end up being ignored. If we want to ensure that tasks are initiated and completed in a timely manner, it may be important to emphasize the proximity of the deadline using visual cues (colors of calendars) or explicitly emphasizing the "like-the-present" nature such as stating "the deadline is in 30 days" instead of just mentioning a deadline date. The researchers did not study the impact of a countdown clock, but perhaps a countdown may be one way to help individuals build a cognitive bridge between the present and a looming deadline. Hopefully, government agencies, universities, corporations and other institutions which heavily rely on deadlines will pay attention to this research and re-evaluate how to convey deadlines in a manner which will reduce procrastination.

   Note: An earlier version of this article was first published on the 3Quarksdaily blog. 


Tu, Y., & Soman, D. (2014). The Categorization of Time and Its Impact on Task Initiation Journal of Consumer Research, 41 (3), 810-822 DOI: 10.1086/677840