This is Your Brain on Lying
What makes one small lie spin into a huge, messy falsehood?
In what felt like one big subtweet to a certain presidential candidate, researchers recently released the results of a study looking at how the brain adapts to dishonesty.
It all starts with a seemingly harmless fib: rounding up your total sales for the month or forgetting to mention your boyfriend to the cute new guy. According to the study, the part of the brain that responds when you’re lying “gets used to” this dishonesty, responding less and less with each falsity. Over time, this could make us more prone to lying — a slippery slope leading to bigger and bigger untruths.
For the study, researchers took a group of 80 adults to play a little game of “how much?” with a partner in another room. Looking at a jar of pennies, the participants were told that the same image would be displayed to their partner. The participants’ goal was to help the partners guess the amount of pennies in the jar with advice sent on a computer.
Then, incentives were added. Participants were told that they would get paid more if their partner overestimated the amount of pennies in the jar, which caused dishonesty to increase in over 60 presentations of the jar. The researchers also tailored the scenario to make the lie either benefit both parties, benefit the partner at the participant’s expense, or benefit both of them without any negative consequences for either person. While participants were more willing hash out the biggest lie when it benefited both parties, scientists found that the self-serving participants’ lies increased over time.
“This study is the first empirical evidence that dishonest behavior escalates when it’s repeated, when all else is held constant,” author Neil Garrett told reporters as reported by Scientific American.
The scientists also used brain scans to monitor brain activity in the participants, focusing on the area in the brain that is associated with emotions — the amygdala. When the participants continued to lie, the response in the amygdala decreased, perhaps becoming desensitized to the guilt.
The study does have some caveats though, as pointed out in a recent New York Times article. The stakes were relatively low for the dishonest persons in the study — no one in the study was going to lose a job or spark outrage with their fibs.
More research is needed, but, according to Garrett, it “highlights the potential dangers of engaging in small acts of dishonesty on a regular basis.”
So, please, tell me: How does this dress really make me look?
