Overview
We all have those friends who sacrifice sleep to get more work done. Maybe you’re one of them. To some, getting less shut-eye to get more done is a noble sacrifice. To others, it sets an undesirable standard for others, particularly peers or colleagues. But it’s an open question how others view someone who brings it up.
In a previous experiment, we found that a hypothetical co-worker who stays to work later than other employees was liked less by peers. Does that hold true for a friend who isn’t even competing with you at the same company?
Experiment
We conducted an experiment with 400 people on Amazon Mechanical Turk in which participants were told about a friend who either gets enough sleep or sacrifices sleep for work.
Participants were told to “Imagine you’re talking with a friend about daylight savings time, which leads to talking about sleep in general. Your friend mentions that [they usually get about 7 hours of sleep per night / they work so much that they usually only get about 4 hours of sleep per night]. The ending phrase in brackets was randomly assigned to participants, i.e., they only saw one of these two phrases.
Participants were then asked “At this moment, how much do you like this person? (1 = Not at all, 7 = Extremely)” using a 1-7 scale.
Results
We found a significant difference in likability between our 7-hour sleeper (avg. = 5.19) and 4-hour sleeper (avg. = 4.70), such that our work-more-sleep-less friend was liked quite a bit less (p < 0.001). This difference was about half of a point on our 1-7 scale, or approximately a 10% reduction.
The results did not differ by gender or political beliefs. There was a marginally significant effect for age (p = 0.052), such that older participants liked the sleep-sacrificing colleague less than younger participants (about 0.02 points less on a 1-7 scale for each additional year of age). The effect was more pronounced for Millennials and Gen X, the two generations . However, we'd want to replicate this effect before placing too much emphasis on it.
In conclusion, if you tend to sacrifice sleep for work, you may not want to complain or brag about it to your friends or colleagues. You may even want to consider a healthier sleep cycle, if you can.
Methods Note
To test for significant differences in likability between our experimental conditions, we used an independent samples t-test. For statistically significant results, the difference between the averages of the two groups would be large, and the corresponding “p-value” would be small (p < 0.05). This indicates that if we were to replicate the study with the same population, we would likely obtain a similar effect. Additionally, we utilized OLS regression analyses with interaction terms to explore potential significant interactions between the main results and participant demographics, such as political beliefs.
Data and survey materials used for this experiment are available upon request.