A lot of bad behaviour goes on at night. Too much drinking, eating, fighting and all the rest.
But is this just down to the fact that people are mostly at work during the day, or is it more than that?
Could it be that people’s self-control is sapped by everyday events and, by the evening, those with the relevant tendencies can’t stop themselves cutting loose?
We may start the day with all the best intentions, but by the time the evening rolls around, these have gone out of the window.
If this is really true, then it should be possible to see this decline in people’s self-control over the day.
If, say, we compare people’s moral behaviour in the morning with that in the afternoon, there should be a measurable difference.
That’s exactly what Kouchaki and Smith (2013) have done in a new study published in Psychological Science. Being positive souls, though, they called it the ‘morning morality’ effect: the idea that we are at our most moral in the mornings.
Source material from PsyBlog