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How Lying Takes Our Brains Down A 'Slippery Slope’ Leading to Larger Transgressions

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Should it be called the Pinocchio syndrome.  

Telling small lies desensitizes our brains to the associated negative emotions and may encourage us to tell bigger lies in future, reveals new University College London (UCL) research funded by Wellcome and the Center for Advanced Hindsight.  

The team scanned volunteers’ brains while they took part in tasks where they could lie for personal gain. They found that the amygdala, a part of the brain associated with emotion, was most active when people first lied for personal gain. The amygdala’s response to lying declined with every lie while the magnitude of the lies escalated. Crucially, the researchers found that larger drops in amygdala activity predicted bigger lies in future.
“Dishonesty is an integral part of our social world, influencing domains ranging from finance and politics to personal relationships. Anecdotally, digressions from a moral code are often described as a series of small breaches that grow over time,” write the authors of  ”The brain adapts to dishonesty.” 
a  paper published in Nature Neuroscience, which provides the first empirical evidence that self-serving lies gradually escalate and reveals how this happens in our brains.
The findings uncovered a “biological mechanism that supports a ‘slippery slope’: what begins as small acts of dishonesty can escalate into larger transgressions.” 
Pinocchio 

Credit:  courtesy of xavier33300 via Flickr

“When we lie for personal gain, our amygdala produces a negative feeling that limits the extent to which we are prepared to lie,” explains senior author Dr Tali Sharot (UCL Experimental Psychology). “However, this response fades as we continue to lie, and the more it falls the bigger our lies become. This may lead to the ‘slippery slope’ where small acts of dishonesty escalate into more significant lies.”
The study included 80 volunteers who took part in a team estimation task that involved guessing the number of pennies in a jar and sending their estimates to unseen partners using a computer. This took place in several different scenarios. In the baseline scenario, participants were told that aiming for the most accurate estimate would benefit them and their partner. In various other scenarios, over- or under-estimating the amount would either benefit them at their partner’s expense, benefit both of them, benefit their partner at their own expense, or only benefit one of them with no effect on the other.

When over-estimating the amount would benefit the volunteer at their partner’s expense, people started by slightly exaggerating their estimates which elicited strong amygdala responses. Their exaggerations escalated as the experiment went on while their amygdala responses declined.

“It is likely the brain’s blunted response to repeated acts of dishonesty reflects a reduced emotional response to these acts,” says lead author Dr Neil Garrett (UCL Experimental Psychology). “This is in line with suggestions that our amygdala signals aversion to acts that we consider wrong or immoral. We only tested dishonesty in this experiment, but the same principle may also apply to escalations in other actions such as risk taking or violent behaviour.”

Dr Raliza Stoyanova, Senior Portfolio Developer in the Neuroscience and Mental Health team at Wellcome, said: “This is a very interesting first look at the brain’s response to repeated and increasing acts of dishonesty. Future work would be needed to tease out more precisely whether these acts of dishonesty are indeed linked to a blunted emotional response, and whether escalations in other types of behaviour would have the same effect.”

Contacts and sources:
Harry Dayantis

University College London (UCL)
Citation: “The brain adapts to dishonesty”  Neil Garrett, Stephanie C Lazzaro, Dan Ariely & Tali Sharot  Nature Neuroscience (2016) doi:10.1038/nn.4426  in Nature Neuroscience
Other related links; 


Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/2016/10/how-lying-takes-our-brains-down.html



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    • Laser Guided Loogie

      This is the “Overton Window” effect.

      When you put up with little things, you start to put up with more and more little things until you find yourself putting up with things you would never have before.

      Like our criminal government, for example.

      -Ken
      LaserGuidedLoogie.com

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