Are Early Birds More Disciplined? A Social Jet Lag Perspective

Abstract

The relationship between personality and morningness-eveningness orientation is attracting a lot of attention. The relationship between morningness-eveningness orientation and personality related to self-regulation, however, remains unclear. The present research adopted a general American adult sample to investigate the relationship among morning and evening types and the individual self-regulatory trait. More important was that we used social jet lag theory to explain this relationship. According to the different scales that were used to measure self-regulatory trait, Study 1 obtained the convergent result that morningness is positively related to high self-regulation. In Study 2, we found that misalignment of rising time between free and work days (reflecting social jet lag) could partly explain the positive relationship between morningness and self-regulation. More specifically, because morning types can work in accordance with their natural clock, they have more resources for self-regulation; therefore, they have higher-self-regulation than intermediate types and evening types do.