Unethical Decision Making and Sleep Restriction: Experimental Evidence

Dark Versus Light Personality Types and Moral Choice

“…This tasks therefore presents the participants with a monetary temptation to over-report the actual number of HEADS flipped (as well as possibly not flipping a coin at all, which can be assess through analysis of the response times on the task page). As has been noted in the literature, this task cannot identify cheaters at the individual level, but others have found that those who report more HEADS on this multi-flip Coin Flip task are also those who are more likely to have cheated in a separate task where the individual cheater is identifiable (Dickinson and Masclet, 2021).…”

No increased tendencies for money-incentivized cheating after 24-hr total sleep deprivation.

“…It is possible that at the individual level, participants who are more vulnerable to TSD exhibit a greater tendency to cheat. Previous studies that reported a greater tendency to cheat due to insufficient sleep typically employed tasks (e.g., matrix task) where cheating at the individual level is identifiable (Christian & Ellis, 2011; Dickinson & Masclet, 2021). Second, despite the consensus that TSD deprives cognitive control resources, we did not directly measure participants’ cognitive control resources before and after the night of TSD.…”

“…Thus, TSD provides a compelling method to deplete an individual's level of cognitive control resources. Second, except for a few studies (Christian & Ellis, 2011;Dickinson & Masclet, 2021), prior research that approached the question of the impact of sleep loss on unethical behaviors had not experimentally manipulated the participants' sleep states. Instead, these studies have approximated the participants' quality and duration of sleep based on monitoring past sleep durations (Barnes et al, 2011(Barnes et al, , 2020Lanaj et al, 2014), daylight time shift (Wagner et al, 2012), or having participants performing the tests in the morning versus the evening (Gunia et al, 2014;Kouchaki & Smith, 2014).…”

“…Congruent with the ego-depletion theory (Baumeister & Heatherton, 1996), much research has found that after a mentally demanding task, which drains their cognitive control resources, participants are more likely to cheat in a subsequent task (Gino et al, 2011;Mead et al, 2009;Muraven et al, 2006;Yam et al, 2014). In a related vein, research has also documented that cognitive fatigue, as a result of sleep loss, contributes to increased unethical behaviors and reduced prosocial behaviors (Barnes et al, 2011(Barnes et al, , 2020Christian & Ellis, 2011;Dickinson & Masclet, 2021;Dickinson & McElroy, 2017;Holbein et al, 2019;Lanaj et al, 2014;Wagner et al, 2012). Together, this stream of research highlights the importance of adequate cognitive control resources to override dishonest tendencies.…”

Intuitive or Deliberative Dishonesty: The effect of abstract versus concrete victim

“…For example, Shalvi and colleagues found that time pressure increased cheating, but Van and colleagues didn't found the consistent results in their replication studies 8,9 . Other experimental works have similarly revealed that through cognitive load 10,11 , mental or physical depletion [12][13][14] , priming of intuition concepts 15 will increase self-serving dishonesty. These findings suggest that dishonesty comes naturally, whereas honesty requires overcoming the initial tendency to cheat.…”