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New research by University of California, Berkeley scientists shows that a lack of sleep impairs our basic social conscience, making us withdraw our desire and willingness to help other people.
Inadequate sleep represents a significant influential force determining whether humans choose to help one another, observable across micro- and macroscopic levels of civilized interaction. Image credit: Sasin Tipchai.
Humans help each other. Helping is a prominent feature of Homo sapiens, and represents a fundamental force sculpting the advent and preservation of modern civilizations.
The ubiquity of helping is evident across the full spectrum of societal layers.
From global government-to-government aid packages, to country-wide pledge drives, and to individuals altruistically gifting money or donating their own blood to strangers, the expression of helping is abundant and pervasive.
So much so that this fundamental act has scaled into a lucent and sizable ‘helping economy,’ with charitable giving in the United States amounting to $450 billion in 2019; a value representing 5.5% of the gross domestic product.
In the United Kingdom, 10 billion pounds were donated to charity in 2017 and 2018.
Indeed, more than 50% of individuals across the United States, Europe, and Asia will have reported donating to charity or helping a stranger within the past month.
Human helping is therefore globally abundant, common across diverse societies, sizable in scope, substantive in financial magnitude, consequential in ramification, and frequent in occurrence.
“Over the past 20 years, we have discovered a very intimate link between our sleep health and our mental health,” said senior author Professor Matthew Walker, a researcher in the Center for Human Sleep Science and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Indeed, we’ve not been able to discover a single major psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal.”
“But this new work demonstrates that a lack of sleep not only damages the health of an individual, but degrades social interactions between individuals and, furthermore, degrades the very fabric of human society itself.”
“How we operate as a social species — and we are a social species — seems profoundly dependent on how much sleep we are getting.”
Replicated across three different experiments, Professor Walker and colleagues examined how sleep loss affects our willingness to help others.
First, individual willingness to help others and brain activity were assessed through a self-reported altruism questionnaire after a night of normal sleep and after a night of sleep deprivation, and these individuals had their brain activity assessed using fMRI imaging.
Second, a group of people was given the altruism questionnaire after keeping sleep diaries evaluating sleep quality and quantity.
Third, donations in the United States were determined in the weeks before and after losing an hour of sleep due to Daylight Saving Time.
The fMRI showed that sleep deprivation dampened activity in the social cognition brain network known to be more active during pro-social behaviors.
Overall, this impairment in prosocial brain activity was associated with less self-reported desire to help others in the first two experiments.
It was also associated with less actual monetary help in the third experiment, which found a 10% drop in donation amounts after the loss of an hour of sleep.
As many societies report reductions in sleep, understanding how this influences our willingness to help others is becoming more important.
The findings indicate that altruistic acts, such as drives to help victims of natural disasters or war, can be hampered by even minor reductions in a society’s sleep.
On the flip side, asking people for help or timing donation drives to periods of adequate sleep could make them more effective.
“Helping is a core, fundamental feature of humankind,” Professor Walker said.
“This new research demonstrates that a lack of sleep degrades the very fabric of human society itself.”
“How we operate as a social species — and we are a social species — seems profoundly dependent on how much sleep we are getting.”
The results were published in the journal PLoS Biology.
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E. Ben Simon et al. 2022. Sleep loss leads to the withdrawal of human helping across individuals, groups, and large-scale societies. PLoS Biol 20 (8): e3001733; doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001733
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