Chronic sleep restriction affects the association between implicit bias and explicit social decision making

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Social Psychology

Background:

• Sleep restriction (SR) is known to impair cognitive control and potentially exacerbate negative implicit biases.
• Understanding the impact of SR on social-evaluative decision-making, particularly threat assessment based on facial cues, is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether sleep restriction influences decision-making in a social-evaluative task involving facial threat judgments.
• To examine how changes in negative implicit biases due to sleep restriction affect this decision-making process.

Main Methods:

• Fourteen healthy adults participated in a counterbalanced, in-laboratory study comparing chronic sleep restriction (SR) and control sleep (CS) conditions over three weeks.
• Participants completed the Arab Muslim Names Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure implicit bias and the Karolinska Airport Task (KAT) for explicit decision-making on facial threat.

Main Results:

• Following SR, participants were more prone to judging individuals with negative facial features as dangerous compared to after CS.
• A significant positive correlation was found between higher negative implicit bias toward Arab Muslims and the tendency to perceive untrustworthy facial features as more dangerous after SR (r=0.76, P=.007).
• This correlation was not significant after the control sleep condition (r=0.33, P=.28).

Conclusions:

• Sleep restriction not only amplifies implicit biases against minority groups but also alters explicit decision-making regarding trustworthiness based on facial characteristics.
• These findings have significant implications for professions requiring sleep-deprived individuals to make critical judgments about others' trustworthiness, such as in law enforcement, security, and military roles.