Commonly Experienced Sleep Restriction and Behavior in Strategic Social Interactions

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This project seeks to understand how commonly experienced levels of insufficient sleep may affect decision making in important 2-person strategic interactions. Sleep deprivation is considered a public heath epidemic by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and current sleep trends indicate that approximately 30% of the U.S. adult population receives 6-7 hours or fewer of nightly sleep. And, while research has made significant advances at understanding how sleep restriction affects decision making, the domain of interactive decisions and social tasks is largely unstudied. Simple strategic interactions are the building blocks of more complicated decision environments that highlight prosocial (or anti-social) behavior and the benefits from social interactions. Therefore, this research will not only advance science, but it will also benefit society in furthering our understanding of the full costs of current trends regarding insufficient sleep. Additional benefits from this research include research assistants training in both economics and psychology, thus extending the interdisciplinary benefits of the project to the level of student engagement.A main objective of this project is to examine strategic 2-person interactions in well-rested (WR) and sleep-restricted (SR) subjects. An ecologically valid at-home sleep restriction protocol will be administer to young adult subjects. The at-home protocol more closely mirrors one's naturalistic sleep environment compared to a sleep lab, thus delivering high external validity regarding the sleep manipulation. The strategic decision tasks planned are selected to help identify key cognitive components of decision making affected by sleep (e.g., backwards induction, optimism, use of heuristics). Sleep levels will be randomly assigned to subjects and then passively but objectively measured using wrist-worn actigraphy for a full week of treatment sleep (SR=5-6 hrs/night attempted sleep; WR=8-9 hrs/night attempted sleep). Following the treatment week, subjects will be administered a set of strategic decision tasks involving cooperation, coordination, and zero-sum bargaining. Because these tasks form the building blocks of more complicated real world strategic environments, this research hopes to make significant contributions to our understanding of how common levels of insufficient sleep may harm the outcomes and efficiency realized from social interactions.