What determines how generous you are as a person? Could it be how much money you have? How inherently kind you are? Or maybe it comes down to the values you hold.
These are all reasonable assumptions. And, of course, how generous you are can change day-to-day. One factor affecting that daily inclination to generosity, according to a new study from the University of California–Berkeley, is how well you’ve slept.
Sleep deprivation, the researchers found, leads to a reduction in generosity.
The researchers tested, in three different ways, how kind people were when they were tired. In the first study, they deprived 21 volunteers of sleep for 24 hours, then asked them how willing they would be to help in a range of scenarios such as helping a stranger carry their shopping bags….