Less Sleep Makes People More Selfish, Study Suggests

A lack of sleep may make humans less willing to help one another, according to three separate experiments conducted at the University of California, Berkeley.

In states that lost an hour of daylight because of daylight saving, charitable donations fell 10% in the week after the time change, compared to states that didn't change their clocks.

Matthew Walker is a co-author of the study and professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley.

In an experiment where scientists compared the brain activity of a group of people after 8 hours of sleep to their brain activity after a night of no sleep, they found sleep deprivation significantly reduced activity in social areas of the brain that are engaged when humans empathise with one another.

Researchers measured the quality of sleep of more than 100 people over the course of three or four nights to see if they were willing to help others.

According to Eti Ben Simon, a study co-author and neuroscientist at the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley, poor sleep quality leads to a decrease in the desire to help other people.

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Helping is one of the fundamental features of humankind. The research shows that a lack of sleep is bad for society. How we operate as a social species depends on how much sleep we get.

Surprising Fact

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some 34% of Americans don't get the recommended 7 hours of sleep per night.

Key Background

A lack of sleep has been linked to a number of health problems. Recent studies show that sleep deprivation may be connected to social behaviors. Helping one another is a fundamental part of modern civilization. They theorize that insufficient sleep may affect human beings' willingness to help one another because it hinders emotional processing and causes heightened emotional reactivity. Increased levels of cortisol, the primary stress hormone, caused by a lack of sleep may also play a role in reducing social behaviors. The UC Berkeley scientists concluded that policies that help individuals and communities get more high quality sleep could promote greater helping and generosity.

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