Make It a Venti, You Liar

Good news, java heads: Your addiction may make you a more ethical worker. That’s what a group of scientists from the University of Arizona and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill discovered in a study published in the March Journal of Applied Psychology. The researchers kept 229 college students awake for 24 hours and then told them being honest would earn them $2 and a partner $5. If they lied to their partner, they got the $5, and the partner got $2. “One instructor would gently suggest they lie, and we found people were more likely to follow that unethical instruction when they were sleep-deprived,” says Michael Christian, a co-author of the study. The reason, he says, is that the prefrontal cortex (the region of the brain that regulates emotions and behavior) is impaired by a lack of sleep. “Basically, we’re more likely to do bad stuff when we’re tired,” he adds. Christian says that in thousands of sleep-deprivation studies, this one is the first to link exhaustion to malevolence.