Saturday, September 03, 2022

On sleep loss leads to the withdrawal of human helping across individuals, groups, and large-scale societies

I guess, this latest study confirms longstanding conventional wisdom! Sleep more, be happier! 😊 Being well rested means so much!

This study also sheds new light on the many detrimental effects of daylight savings time! I am so glad I live in Arizona (except for the Navajo Nation), which does not obey DST! This relic of World War I should finally be abolished!

From the abstract:
"... Across 3 replicating studies, here, we demonstrate that sleep loss represents one previously unrecognized factor dictating whether humans choose to help each other, observed at 3 different scales (within individuals, across individuals, and across societies). First, at an individual level, 1 night of sleep loss triggers the withdrawal of help from one individual to another. Moreover, fMRI findings revealed that the withdrawal of human helping is associated with deactivation of key nodes within the social cognition brain network that facilitates prosociality. Second, at a group level, ecological night-to-night reductions in sleep across several nights predict corresponding next-day reductions in the choice to help others during day-to-day interactions. Third, at a large-scale national level, we demonstrate that 1 h of lost sleep opportunity, inflicted by the transition to Daylight Saving Time, reduces real-world altruistic helping through the act of donation giving, established through the analysis of over 3 million charitable donations. Therefore, inadequate sleep represents a significant influential force determining whether humans choose to help one another, observable across micro- and macroscopic levels of civilized interaction. The implications of this effect may be non-trivial when considering the essentiality of human helping in the maintenance of cooperative, civil society, combined with the reported decline in sufficient sleep in many first-world nations."

Sleep loss leads to the withdrawal of human helping across individuals, groups, and large-scale societies | PLOS Biology (open access)



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