Department of Political Science, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA.
Department of Political Science, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany.
Nat Hum Behav. 2019 May;3(5):492-500. doi: 10.1038/s41562-019-0543-4. Epub 2019 Mar 4.
Insufficient sleep is a growing public health concern in industrial societies. Although a lack of sleep is known to negatively affect private behaviours-such as working or going to school-comparatively little is known about its consequences for the social behaviours that hold society and democracy together. Using three complementary methods, we show how insufficient sleep affects various measures of civic participation. With survey data from two countries, we show that insufficient sleep predicts lower voter turnout. Next, with a geographical regression discontinuity design, we demonstrate that individuals from the United States who tend to sleep less due to circadian impacts of time-zone boundaries are also less likely to vote. Finally, we experimentally manipulate short-term sleep over a two-stage study. We observe that the treatment decreases the levels of civic engagement, as shown by their willingness to vote, sign petitions and donate to charities. These results highlight the strong negative consequences that current levels of insufficient sleep have on vitally important measures of social capital.
睡眠不足是工业社会日益严重的公共卫生问题。尽管众所周知，睡眠不足会对个人行为（如工作或上学）产生负面影响，但对于睡眠不足对维持社会和民主的社会行为的影响，人们知之甚少。我们使用三种互补的方法，展示了睡眠不足如何影响各种公民参与措施。通过来自两个国家的调查数据，我们表明睡眠不足会降低选民投票率。接下来，通过地理回归不连续性设计，我们证明由于时区边界的生物钟影响而倾向于睡眠较少的美国人也不太可能投票。最后，我们在一项两阶段的研究中进行了短期睡眠的实验性操作。我们观察到，治疗会降低公民参与度，表现在他们愿意投票、签署请愿书和向慈善机构捐款的意愿上。这些结果强调了当前睡眠不足水平对社会资本的重要衡量指标产生的强烈负面影响。
