When are you most honest – morning or afternoon?
Credit to Author: REY ELBO| Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 16:18:23 +0000
SERIOUSLY, when is the best time to discover the morality and ethical standards of people around you? When would you propose to do the interview of job applicants for a key, managerial post — morning or afternoon? When is the best time to negotiate with a supplier, contractor or even a business partner toward a healthy working relationship?
When is the best time to conduct a disciplinary action against employees? When is the right time to discover if your current or future manager, supplier or business partner has the right morality fit toward a perpetual and mutually-lasting working relationship?
This topic came to me when I heard about the “ninja cops” who are being accused of many unlawful activities in planning and doing a drug buy-bust operation in 2013. The ongoing Senate investigation discovered many irregularities and inconsistencies that if we are to believe the police would be illogical and against human capacity.
For one, legal records show that the sting operations happened in the morning, but the lead cop tells the senators the drug bust happened in the afternoon. When I dig into this issue vis-à-vis a business theory, I bumped into the “Morning Morality Effect” suggesting that many of us are “engaged in less unethical behavior (e.g., less lying and cheating) on tasks performed in the morning than on the same tasks performed in the afternoon.”
In 2013, scholar-researchers Maryam Kouchaki and Isaac H. Smith published the result of a series of their four experiments titled “The Morning Morality Effect: The Influence of Time of Day on Unethical Behavior.” It proves that people have a decreased “moral awareness and self-control in the afternoon.”
Their findings were qualified, however, by the 2014 study by Brian Gunia, Christopher Barns and Sunita Sah showing that “people have chronotypes that dictate their individual circadian rhythms (i.e. their 24-hour cycles of physiological functions).” They classify morning people as “larks” while evening people are called “owls.”
Daniel H. Pink, author of the best-selling 2018 opus “When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing” explains this in simple terms: “(E)arly risers display the morning morality effect. But night owls are more ethical at night than in the morning.” Therefore, the Morning Morality Effect is not absolute as it depends much on your personality either as a lark or an owl.
I don’t have any scientific study to offer either to accept or debunk the claim of the two contrasting studies, except to create a third perspective — the “Age and Ailment Morality Effect.” When you have reached your senior years while suffering from many visible and invisible ailments and is presumed to be at the pre-departure area of your life, isn’t the best approach is to be more honest, transparent and ethical regardless of the time of the day and one’s personality?
Knowing of your advanced age in life and suffering from those usual ailments — cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, osteoporosis and dementia ― isn’t the best approach is to thank the Lord, first thing in the morning for giving you another day? This morning ritual, complemented by continual prayer during day time, in and out of the church until evening prayers before bedtime, should help one upgrade and level-up one’s ethical standards.
There should be no ifs and buts. Regardless of your age, medical condition, personality type, time of the day or whatever, there’s no better way but to be morally-bound everyday and everywhere because you will never know when your time is up. It should be the only motivation that one should think of.
Just the same, ask people if they’re comfortable working in the morning or afternoon. For whatever its worth, you can determine that lark and owl people can do better when they express themselves in their unguarded moments. It would be an interesting subject to tackle by our academics and other people who have plenty of time, talent and treasure.
Surely, it’s best to know and understand the answers to the following questions: When is the best time to catch criminals? What is the usual time when bank robbers strike? What day of the week? When is the best time judges render an objective and well-studied decision against convicts — morning or afternoon? And in the case of ninja cops and other suspected crooks down there, what time of the day would they tell a blatant lie, if not evade important questions from the senators?
Like in the 1969 pop song “Space Oddity” by David Bowie, there’s no use exploring into space, seeing its wonders, and gaining new insights unless an astronaut comes back to Earth to share his findings with the world.
Likewise, there are many important data slumbering in the steel cabinets of the police, the prosecutors, and the courts, among other agencies and elsewhere.
We need scholars, researchers and academics to help us determine insights and wisdom from it all.
Indeed, time is very important. If we could only understand the past, then surely, we could understand the future. Just the same, let’s understand everything in its proper context to arrive at a conclusion that the best measure of one’s honesty is not necessarily limited to the time of the day, personality, age, medical condition, and his income tax return.
Rey Elbo is a consultant specializing in human resources and total quality management as a fused interest. Send feedback to elbonomics@gmail.com or via https://reyelbo.consulting