close
Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2020 Dec:197:109590.
doi: 10.1016/j.econlet.2020.109590. Epub 2020 Sep 25.

Later bedtimes predict President Trump's performance

Affiliations

Later bedtimes predict President Trump's performance

Douglas Almond et al. Econ Lett. 2020 Dec.

Abstract

Technology and social media use are increasingly associated with delays in nightly sleep. Here, we consider the timing of President Trump's official Twitter account posts as a proxy for sleep duration and how it relates to his public performance. The President wakes around 6am, a routine which has not changed since early 2017. In contrast, the frequency of Twitter activity 11pm-2am increased 317% from under one day per week in 2017 to three days a week in 2020. The President's increased late-night activity is not accounted for by increases in the frequency of his use of social media over time, his travel schedule, or seasonality. On the day following one where he posts late at night, his Twitter followers interact less with his posts, described as "official statements by the President of the United States". He receives 7400 fewer likes per tweet, 1300 fewer retweets per tweet, and 1400 fewer replies per tweet after a late night (drops of 6.5%-8%). Tweets aside, the President's speeches and interview transcripts have previously been coded for their dominant emotion through text analysis. On the day following a late night, the President's inferred emotion is less likely to be "happy" and nearly three times more likely to be "angry" in his interviews and speeches. Finally, the 2020 election odds of the President's chief opponent also increase after a late night, while the President's are unchanged. The pattern we document is consistent with a progressive shortening of the President's sleep over his first term and compromised performance from sleep deprivation.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Diurnal cycle every half hour over 24 hours (top) and over sleep hours (bottom).
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Fraction of late-tweeting nights from January 24, 2017 to April 10, 2020. (We use daily binaries of late-tweeting, sum them together every week and divide it by seven to calculate the weekly fraction. Red horizontal lines are the annual mean of the weekly fraction. We sum weekly fraction on that week, four weekly values before and four after, and divide this sum by nine to calculate monthly moving average. The first week of 2018, 2019 and 2020 are marked in vertical dash lines.).
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Proportion of happy transcripts from January 24, 2017 to April 10, 2020. (For each transcript, we assign happy dummy which equals one if its dominant emotion is happy and zero if not. We use Trump’s word count in each transcript as weight and calculate weighted sum of happy dummies on each day. We define daily proportion of happy transcripts as the weighted sum divided by the number of transcripts. We take the average of daily proportion to weekly value, and calculate monthly moving average using that week, four weeks before and after. Red horizontal lines are the annual mean of the weekly proportion. The first week of 2018, 2019 and 2020 are marked in vertical dash lines.).

References

    1. Akerlof G.A. Sins of omission and the practice of economics. J. Econ. Lit. 2020;58(2):405–418.
    1. Andrew M. 2017. A bot that can tell when it’s really Donald Trump who’s tweeting.
    1. Angrist J.D., Pischke J.-S. Princeton University Press; Princeton, New Jersey: 2009. Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist’s Companion.
    1. Avery M., Giuntella O., Jiao P. 2019. Why Don’t We Sleep Enough? A Field Experiment among College Students: IZA DP No. 12772.
    1. Barnes C.M., Schaubroeck J., Huth M., Ghumman S. Lack of sleep and unethical conduct. Organ. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 2011;115(2):169–180.

LinkOut - more resources