Exploring the Morning Morality Effect in the Context of Moral Utilitarianism
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Recent research has shown mixed evidence for the morning morality effect (MME; i.e., the observation that individuals are less immoral in the morning than in the afternoon). In the present research, we target the morning morality effect in the context of moral utilitarianism, for which this effect has never been explored. We first reanalyzed observational data from six studies previously conducted by our lab, which included different tasks capturing moral utilitarianism. A meta-analytic model showed that participants become less utilitarian as the day goes on, but with a small effect size ( r = −0.14, 95% CI = [−0.25, −0.02]) and large heterogeneity. Exploration of this heterogeneity showed that this association was statistically significant for classic sacrificial dilemmas only. We next conducted an experimental study of the morning morality effect, which aimed to experimentally support the results previously observed in the meta-analysis, as well as to explore, in addition, a possible moderating effect of chronotype. These experimental results showed no reliable overall effect of time of day on moral utilitarianism (SMD = 0.04, 95% CI = [−0.21, 0.28]). A potential moderating effect of chronotype was detected in secondary analyses, but that needs to be replicated. The implications and limitations are discussed.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it