Abstract
Judgements and decisions in many political, economic or medical contexts are often made while sleep deprived. Furthermore, in such contexts individuals are required to integrate information provided by – more or less qualified – advisors. We asked if sleep deprivation affects advice taking. We conducted a 2 (sleep deprivation: yes vs. no) ×2 (competency of advisor: medium vs. high) experimental study to examine the effects of sleep deprivation on advice taking in an estimation task. We compared participants with one night of total sleep deprivation to participants with a night of regular sleep. Competency of advisor was manipulated within subjects. We found that sleep deprived participants show increased advice taking. An interaction of condition and competency of advisor and further post-hoc analyses revealed that this effect was more pronounced for the medium competency advisor compared to the high competency advisor. Furthermore, sleep deprived participants benefited more from an advisor of high competency in terms of stronger improvement in judgmental accuracy than well-rested participants.
Highlights
Last year’s overnight EU summits deciding on last-minute financial rescue packages for Greece give the impression that it is becoming a tradition to make important decisions under acute sleep deprivation (SD)
One interesting question arises from these findings of performance deficits due to SD: To what extent are individuals aware of those deficits? This is important with respect to the question of how we can utilize advice when being sleep deprived, since advice taking could help individuals to compensate for those deficits
Sniezek and Buckley[15] introduced the Judge Advisor Systems (JAS) as an experimental paradigm to systematically study social influence related to consultation and advice taking
Summary
Last year’s overnight EU summits deciding on last-minute financial rescue packages for Greece give the impression that it is becoming a tradition to make important decisions under acute sleep deprivation (SD). One important social aspect in judgment is the role of advice, and the study reported here is the first to examine about whether SD affects advice taking. It is well documented that even one night of total sleep deprivation detrimentally affects a broad range of judgments and decisions[4]. We argue that due to lower confidence and higher susceptibility to social influence, SD increases advice taking. Sniezek and Buckley[15] introduced the Judge Advisor Systems (JAS) as an experimental paradigm to systematically study social influence related to consultation and advice taking. The main focus of judge-advisor research lies on the effects of advice taking ( advice under-utilization, so-called egocentric discounting) on judgment accuracy and decisional confidence[16], a large – yet growing – body of empirical studies tested potential moderators of advice taking. It has been shown that individuals are more receptive to good advice compared to bad advice[17] and paid advice is used more than free advice, even if it is of the same quality[18]
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