Photo: flickr/jurvetson
Ever wonder why it's so much easier to avoid cheating on your diet first thing in the morning than it is late at night? Apparently, it's because you have a daily "quota" of willpower, and by the end of the day it's often depleted, making it extra difficult to resist that midnight fudge sundae. Here, researchers tested whether this phenomenon is also true for morality. They had participants complete several different tests in either the morning or the afternoon, including
The Morning Morality Effect: The Influence of Time of Day on Unethical Behavior. "Are people more moral in the morning than in the afternoon? We propose that the normal, unremarkable experiences associated with everyday living can deplete one's capacity to resist moral temptations. In a series of four experiments, both undergraduate students and a sample of U.S. adults engaged in less unethical behavior (e.g., less lying and cheating) ...
