Beauty of ambiguity in the eye of the night owl: Morningness-eveningness preference is associated with tolerance of ambiguity

Prior work has robustly linked eveningness, a preference for later sleep and activity timing, to distinct personality profiles, such as openness to experience and divergent thinking. In turn, these individual differences have been associated with individuals’ ability to navigate uncertain situations. Synthesizing these lines of evidence, we hypothesized that eveningness, as assessed by the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (MEQ), would be positively associated with tolerance of ambiguity. We tested this hypothesis across three methodologically complementary studies (N = 835) that incorporated samples from two cultural contexts (Chinese and Laotian) and multiple measures of tolerance of ambiguity (self-report and behavioral indices). In Study 1, we provided preliminary evidence that individuals with a stronger evening preference exhibited higher levels of tolerance of ambiguity in a sample of Chinese university students. To increase the generalizability of our findings, we sampled Laotian community adults in Study 2 and successfully replicated the observed relationship. Finally, moving beyond self-report measures, Study 3 provided convergent behavioral evidence for the association in a Chinese non-student sample. Taken together, these findings, which replicate across two cultural contexts, extend research on morningness-eveningness beyond the traditional domains of sleep, affect, and performance by identifying tolerance of ambiguity as a novel psychological correlate of eveningness.