The Brain Adapts to Dishonesty

NATURE NEUROSCIENCE

If your experience in quarantine is anything like mine then you might find yourself “checking the news” 5 times more than normal in hopes of finding something, anything, that resembles a solution. And it has become clearer than ever that certain news reporters, along with certain politicians, adhere to a self-serving model of dishonesty as a way to share information. To me, the disheartening part is that the blatant lack of honest reporting seems to be getting worse. The silver lining, however, is a reminder that dishonesty sucks, having a self-serving agenda sucks, too, and we could all benefit from a future with a little less deceit.

In this study, researchers assessed brain scans (fMRI) of 80 volunteers as they participated in team estimation tasks involving predictions of the number of pennies in a jar. If I’m being honest, (yes, I’m trying) it’s a drab, wordy write-up and I didn’t feel like reading through all the details. Ah, sweet relief.

The results, nonetheless, are simple enough to gain some general understanding of what goes on in your brain when you lie. Hint: it adapts, but not in a healthy way.

Data from the scans show that after the first lie the amygdala, a key emotional area of the brain that’s associated with fear and anger, lights up like a Christmas tree. As the volunteers continued to tell self-serving lies the activity in the amygdala declined. In other words, their brains became desensitized to dishonesty, snowballing their lies into predictably worse behavior. The first lie is hard, the second lie slightly less difficult, but man, at lie 15, and with re-election on the line, lying is easy.

Takeaway
When we lie once, we risk falling into a habit of dishonesty because our brains are literally adapting to immoral behavior. Unless you’re a sociopath, dishonesty creates distance from other people, which then makes it easier to continue down a path of subsequent unethical behavior. Honesty, on the other hand, is associated with mental and physical resilience.