Sleep deprivation can cause a multitude of health problems. Additionally it can make reflexes and reaction times slower, leading to more accidents. It affects our ability to do our work and causes us to make more mistakes. Sleep deprivation has long been used as an interrogation tactic because it lowers the resistance of the one being interrogated.

Now, the results of a study, conducted by William D.S. Killgore, PhD, and colleagues at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and published in the March 1. 2007 issue of the journal SLEEP, suggest that sleep deprivation leads to difficulty in making decisions and judgments in personal moral dilemmas.

26 healthy subjects (21 men and 5 women) were tested after 53 waking hours. Sleep deprivation resulted in longer response latencies which could indicate greater difficulty in deciding upon a course of action. This finding was only true for personal moral dilemmas and not impersonal moral dilemmas or non-moral dilemmas. Following a period of sleep deprivation, there was a greater willingness to agree with solutions that violate personally held moral beliefs. This willingness, however, was moderated by emotional intelligence. Persons high in emotional intelligence were less susceptible to changes in moral judgments as a function of sleep loss.

Sleep loss causes a decline of activity in the prefrontal cortex. This area has been shown to have a prominent role in the formation of moral judgments. It is thought that sleep deprivation affects the ability to integrate emotion and cognition to guide moral judgments.

The Effects of 53 Hours of Sleep Deprivation on Moral Judgment