Do sleep disruptions promote social fragmentation?

Abstract

Sleep changes predate shifts in mood/affect, thought processing, mental and physical health, civic engagement, and contextual circumstances, among other things. Theory predicts that these changes may lead to shifts in political and social beliefs. Do sleep disruptions shape how individuals see the world, the people around them, and themselves in relation to others? In this article, we use daily survey data from the 77 waves (N $ \approx $ 460,000) of the University of California, Los Angeles’s 2019–2021 Nationscape Survey—a nationally representative political survey—to examine the effect of an exogenous short-term sleep disruption on measures of political views, polarization, and discriminatory beliefs. Using this data set, we leverage the modest sleep disruption that occurs at the start (and end) of Daylight Saving Time (DST) and employ a regression discontinuity in time design around the precise DST cutoff (which we supplement with event study models). Despite strong theoretical expectations and correlational connection between measures of sleep and many outcomes related to social fragmentation, we find that the DST change has little to no causal effect on citizens’ levels of polarization or their discriminatory attitudes. These effects are precise enough to rule out small effects, robust to a host of specification checks, and consistent across potential subgroups of interest. Our work adds to a small but growing body of research on the social and political effects of sleep disruptions.

Introduction to the issue

“…The interdisciplinarity of PLS is manifest in this issue. Topics range from 2020 election-related post-traumatic stress (Fraser et al, 2023) and social fragmentation related to sleep disruptions (Holbein & Crabtree, 2023) to partisan niche construction (Arreguin, 2023) and the origins of morality policy (Wendell & Tatalovich, 2023). Following a cautious approach to COVID-19-related research during and immediately following the well-justified urgency regarding the pandemic, this issue includes two articles regarding Americans' responses to coronavirus policies.…”