Different Neural Mechanisms Underlie Non-habitual Honesty and Non-habitual Cheating

Abstract

There is a long-standing debate regarding the cognitive nature of (dis)honesty: Is honesty an automatic response or does it require willpower in the form of cognitive control in order to override an automatic dishonest response. In a recent study (Speer et al., 2020), we proposed a reconciliation of these opposing views by showing that activity in areas associated with cognitive control, particularly the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), helped dishonest participants to be honest, whereas it enabled cheating for honest participants. These findings suggest that cognitive control is not needed to be honest or dishonest per se but that it depends on an individual’s moral default. However, while our findings provided insights into the role of cognitive control in overriding a moral default, they did not reveal whether overriding honest default behavior (non-habitual dishonesty) is the same as overriding dishonest default behavior (non-habitual honesty) at the neural level. This speaks to the question as to whether cognitive control mechanisms are domain-general or may be context specific. To address this, we applied multivariate pattern analysis to compare neural patterns of non-habitual honesty to non-habitual dishonesty. We found that these choices are differently encoded in the IFG, suggesting that engaging cognitive control to follow the norm (that cheating is wrong) fundamentally differs from applying control to violate this norm.

Cognitive control and dishonesty

“…The findings by Speer and colleagues [35] suggest that activity in the left IFG is responsible for both overriding default honest as well as dishonest responses. However, a reanalysis of these data, using the more sensitive method of multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA), revealed subtle differences between deploying cognitive control in order to cheat as compared to being honest [71].…”

“…Honesty is a strong social norm [72] that is fundamental to making social exchanges possible [73], and participants in empirical studies on dishonesty tend to assume that interaction partners are generally truthful [74]. Therefore, overriding a moral default for honesty may require additional or even slightly different cognitive control mechanisms as compared to overriding the motivation for self-interested profit [71] because the former not only requires overriding one's moral default but also a strong social norm.…”