Is honesty a by-product of lack of temptation?
July 14th, 2009 - 1:18 pm ICT by IANSWashington, July 14 (IANS) Is honesty or truthfulness a by-product of lack of temptation? In a recent study, Harvard psychologists looked at the brain activity of people given the chance to gain money dishonestly by lying.
The study was designed to test the “Will” theory that postulates honesty is a by-product of active resistance to temptation, and “Grace” theory in which honesty stems from a lack of temptation.
Using neuroimaging, the researchers found that honest people showed no additional activity when telling the truth. However, those who behaved dishonestly, even while telling the truth, showed additional activity in brain regions that involve control and attention.
The results suggest that the “Grace” theory is true, because the honest participants did not show any additional brain activity when telling the truth.
“Being honest is not so much a matter of exercising willpower as it is being disposed to behave honestly in a more effortless kind of way,” said Joshua Greene, psychologist at Harvard University.
To prompt participants to lie, they created a cover story about the focus of their study — paranormal ability to predict the future.
Participants were told to predict the outcomes of a series of coin tosses, and were told that the researchers believed predicting the future was more likely when given a monetary incentive and when the prediction wasn’t shared in advance of the outcome.
This gave the participants the opportunity to lie and say that they had correctly predicted the coin toss to win the money.
Individuals who reported improbably high levels of accuracy were classified as dishonest, and participants reporting statistically feasible levels of accuracy were classified as honest.
Using fMRI, Greene found that the honest individuals displayed little to no additional brain activity when reporting their prediction of the coin toss, said a Harvard release.
However, dishonest participants’ brains were most active in control-related brain regions when they chose not to lie.
The study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Tags: brain activity, brain regions, brains, coin toss, coin tosses, fmri, harvard psychologists, harvard university, honest individuals, honesty, joshua greene, july 14, monetary incentive, postulates, predicting the future, psychologist, telling the truth, temptation, truthfulness, willpower
