Sleep Deprivation Affects Moral Judgment

Research has been shown that person’s physical health can be affected with bad sleep. The amount of sleep one can get also influence one’s decision making.

According to the study published in the March 1st issue of the journal SLEEP, sleep deprivation impairs the ability to integrate emotion and cognition to guide moral judgements.

The study was conducted by William D.S. Killgore, PhD, and the colleagues at the Walter Reed Army Institute of research.

It was focused on 26 healthy adults who made judgements about the appropriateness of various courses of action in response to three types of moral dilemmas on two separate occasions: at rested baseline and again following 53 hours of continuous wakefulness.

Compared to baseline, sleep deprivation resulted in significantly longer response latencies for moral personal dilemmas.

According to the findings, continuous wakefulness has a debilitating effect on judgment and decision making processes that depend up on the integration of emotion with cognition.

The studies results provide that sleep loss is particularly disruptive to the ventromedial prefrontal regions of the brain, which are important for the integration of affect any cognition in the service of judgment and decision making.

Most people are confronted with more dilemmas nearly everyday, although the majority of these choices are minor and of little consequence.

According to Dr. Killgore, these study findings do not suggest that sleep deprivation leads to a decline in “morality” or in the quality of moral beliefs, but a latency to respond and the change in the leniency or permissiveness of response style as evidenced by the tendency to decide that particular courses of action were “appropriate” before and after sleep loss.

Results suggest that when sleep deprived, people appear to be selectively slower in their deliberations about moral personal dilemmas relative to other types of dilemmas.

When sleep deprived, such personnel may experience greater difficulty reaching morally based decisions under emotionally evocative circumstances and may be prone to choosing courses of action that differ from those that they would have chosen in a fully rested state.