SCSU professor: Hostility at work might be sleepiness

NEW HAVEN — Can you tell in your boss’ tone that she wants to fire you? She very well might, but an assistant professor of psychology at Southern Connecticut State University says a more relevant question might be whether you’re merely sleepy.

Christopher Budnick, whose research interests center on career development and job research, published a study with Northern Illinois University Professor Larissa K. Barber as a graduate student at that university “Turning molehills into mountains: Sleepiness increases workplace interpretive bias” in 2015. When people are sleepy, the researchers concluded, they exhibit a higher likelihood of interpreting ambiguous situations as threatening or hostile.

“When we’re in a vulnerable state, we perceive information as more threatening,” Budnick said. “That’s because it’s safer to err on the side of caution.”

He said he believes it has a basis in evolutionary history — animals have an instinct not to let their guard down if they believe themselves to be vulnerable to attack. Humans are often peripherally aware of their own sleepiness, as many seek out caffeine in the early afternoon as they feel their energy begin to wane, he said.

“Being aware you’re sleepy triggers this whole process,” he said.

Budnick and Barber conducted three studies to explore this hypothesis. They first had a pool of NIU students rate their current likeliness to fall asleep in certain situations — such as waiting at a red light or reading a book after lunch — to gauge their level of “state sleepiness” The students then took a conditional reasoning test, a test which Budnick said measures aggression, but answers typically remain constant among other factors like personality and emotion.

For example, someone exhibiting aggressive behaviors would interpret the Hammurabian “eye for an eye” law as an excuse to wait to strike, whereas someone exhibiting less aggressive tendencies would see it as not truly solving anything. Students with more aggressive responses were said to exhibit “negative bias,” which Budnick and Barber said correlated with reported sleepiness.

In a second survey of adults using an online data collecting service, the two

researchers surveyed respondents’ state sleepiness and randomly presented them with a workplace scenario that was unfair — such as pay discrepancies — or fair, such as equitable pay. Although sleepy respondents viewed the unfair scenario to be extremely unfair, there was no substantive difference among how well rested they were.

“When it’s fair, there’s no potential threat to be perceived,” Budnick said.

In a third study, the researchers tested what they concluded in the prior two studies by equipping students with a movement and sleep tracker for three days. As the device tracked their sleep, the researchers also manipulated sleep times by staggering when subjects took the implicit bias test, with one group doing it two hours earlier in the morning.

“Overall, what we found is that sleepy people responded more aggressively,” he said.

Ultimately, it wasn’t how much sleep people got that determined whether they responded aggressively so much as whether they felt sleepy.