Back in 2018, I wrote a post about how sleep deprivation (as measured by late-night activity on Twitter) affected the performance of NBA players. It appears the research that post was based on inspired other researchers, as this new paper by Douglas Almond and Xinming Du (both Columbia University) published in the journal Economics Letters (appears it may be open access, but just in case there is an ungated version here) demonstrates. [*] Almond and Du look at the late-night Twitter activity of U.S. President Donald Trump over the period from 2017 to 2020. Specifically, they first show that Trump's Twitter activity begins about 6am each morning (and this is fairly constant across the whole period examined). So, when Trump tweeted after 11pm at night, Almond and Du infer that he must have less than seven hours sleep that night.
Using their dataset, Almond and Du first demonstrate that Trump's late-night Twitter activity has been increasing over time, meaning that he has been getting less sleep over time:
The likelihood of late tweeting increases by 0.22 in 2019 and 0.38 in 2020 relative to the omitted year (2017). This is equivalent to a 183% and 317% increase relative to the 2017 mean, respectively. Additionally, the number of late-night tweets increases over time. He posts roughly one more tweet per night in 2020, a sixfold increase compared with 2017 when he tweeted late about once per week...
So, by 2020 Trump was having more than four times as many late nights as in 2017, and tweeting late at night more frequently. So, what effects do these late nights have? Almond and Du turn to some proxy measures of the quality of the President's work the next day - the number of likes, retweets, and replies that are received by his tweets the day after a late night, compared with tweets the day after he gets more sleep. They find that:
...tweets after a late-tweeting night receive 7400 fewer likes, 1300 fewer retweets and 1400 fewer replies, or 8%, 6.5% and 7% fewer reactions relative to the mean. We interpret these less-influential postings as lower tweet quality.
And, just like your average toddler, a late night affects the President's mood (measured by the emotion of his speeches and interviews as recorded by the Fact Checker website):
...the proportion of happy transcripts decreases 4.4 percentage points (4.9%) following a late night. Despite his being happy in 88% [of] transcripts, late-tweeting nights and more late tweets appear to make him less happy the following day... Meanwhile, the proportion of angry transcripts increases by 2.9 percentage points after a late night, a nearly three-fold increase compared with the mean 1.1%.
Finally, they look at the betting odds of Trump (and his main opponent/s) winning the 2020 Presidential election, and find that:
...a significant relationship between late tweeting and his competitor’s odds. After a late night, more people believe the leading candidate other than Trump is more likely to win and wager on Trump’s opponent. The implied chance of his competitor’s winning increases by .6 percentage points, or 4.8% relative to the mean.
Overall, it appears that lack of sleep negatively affected Trump's performance (just as it does for NBA players). It may even have reduced his chance of re-election last month. Perhaps he should have worried less about 'Sleepy Joe' Biden, and more about 'Sleepy Donald' Trump?
*****
[*] Although the last line of my 2018 post posed the question of whether President Trump's late-night Twitter activity affected his Presidential performance, I can unfortunately take no credit for this research.
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