Are You A Self-Motivated Liar? Dishonesty And Deception Linked To Less Brain Activity - Study
A study by University College London and Duke University investigated the change in brain activity as people told more lies. The study's findings reveal that the transgression of small lies to deception could result to a desensitized brain.
To gather data, the study's authors including Neil Garrett gave participants varying incentives to lie. A functional magnetic resonance imaging scan was used to analyze the brain activity of the participants. The experiment concentrated on an area known as the amygdala, which is linked to emotions. The study's results highlight the association between reduced brain activity and the participant's tendency to lie.
Previous studies support the findings of Garrett's team. One is by Stacey M. Schaefer and colleagues who examined the influence of consciously evoked cognitive mechanism on the emotional response of the subject. This experiment also focused on the degree of activity within the amygdala.
In 2009, Joshua Greene and Joseph M. Paxton of Harvard University published in the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" their investigation on the correlation between neural activity and honest and dishonest moral decisions. Their work furthered previous studies on the impact of automatic and controlled processes on moral judgment
Bernd Weber, a neuroscientist from the University of Bonn in Germany, commended the British study for using participants that are self-motivated liars. He compared it to previous experiments that did not use real-world behaviors.
For developmental psychologist Victoria Talwar, the study will help future research on how lying can develop. She noted its importance to conducting more experiments on the escalation of small lies to bigger ones.
Tali Sharot, Garrett's co-author, believes that the amplification of small lies to bigger deceits can be attributed to societal reasons. She added that the frequency of dishonesty in individuals can be traced back to the biological inner workings of the brain.
