Minna Lyons, University of Liverpool – Late Nights & Mental Health

Do you like to stay up late on Friday and Saturday nights?

Minna Lyons, lecturer in psychology at the University of Liverpool, discusses some personality traits associated with those of us who are night owls.

Dr Minna Lyons is a lecturer in psychology, with a special interest in evolutionary applications to human behaviour. After conducting her PhD research on altruism, she became increasingly interested in the other side of the coin- selfish and manipulative aspects of personality. In the recent years, she has studied the Dark Triad of personality, which centres around three closely related personality traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy.  Rather than maladaptive, adverse personality traits could be evolutionarily adaptive in the right circumstances. In 2014, the research by Minna and her colleagues  on morningness-eveningness and the Dark Triad won the IgNoble Prize for Psychology.

Late Nights & Mental Health

In our research, we were interested in investigating the relationships between manipulative personalities, and the propensity to stay up late. The personality traits of interest were Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy, which comprise the so-called Dark Triad of personality.

Machiavellian individuals are manipulative and scheming, with a cynical view of the world and other people. Narcissistic individuals have a sense of entitlement and grandiose views of themselves. Psychopathy consists of primary psychopathy, which is about callous, unemotional predisposition, and secondary psychopathy, which is about risky, impulsive behaviours.  

In evolutionary terms, these personality traits could facilitate a cheater strategy, which aims to take benefits form others without paying any costs. We expected that the Dark Triad relates to the propensity to stay up late, as the night-time niche may provide more opportunities for exploiting others.

We conducted an on-line study, where over 200 individuals filled in questionnaires on the Dark Triad, and morningness-eveningness. The findings were in the expected direction- we found that people who were high in Machiavellianism, secondary psychopathy, and some facets of narcissism were also more likely to be night-owls. Interestingly, people who were high on primary psychopathy were more morning-type people. This is an especially interesting finding, as primary psychopathy, being callous, unemotional, and lacking emotions such as guilt and shame, has been named as the “successful psychopathy”.  Primary psychopathy could be especially useful in the business world, politics, and so on- basically, in places where operating in the day-time environment would be more useful.

Although our results give some indication of how manipulative personalities operate, the study was correlational, and we can’t infer causality. It could as well be that staying up late causes psychopathy- perhaps the Dark Triad traits are a result of night time living. This is something that should be investigated in future research.