People likely to be moral in morning, dishonest in afternoon

People are more likely to be dishonest in the afternoon than in the morning, a new study has found.

Our ability to exhibit self-control to avoid cheating or lying is significantly reduced over the course of a day, researchers have found.

"As ethics researchers, we had been running experiments examining various unethical behaviours, such as lying, stealing, and cheating," researchers Maryam Kouchaki of Harvard University and Isaac Smith of the University of Utah's David Eccles School of Business explained.

"We noticed that experiments conducted in the morning seemed to systematically result in lower instances of unethical behaviour," they said.

They also discovered that the extent to which people behave unethically without feeling guilt or distress - known as moral disengagement made a difference in how strong the morning morality effect was. Those participants with a higher propensity to morally disengage were likely to cheat in both the morning and the afternoon.

The findings were published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.