I lie, why don't you: Neural mechanisms of individual differences in self‐serving lying

Abstract

People tend to lie in varying degrees. To advance our understanding of the underlying neural mechanisms of this heterogeneity, we investigated individual differences in self‐serving lying. We performed a functional magnetic resonance imaging study in 37 participants and introduced a color‐reporting game where lying about the color would in general lead to higher monetary payoffs but would also be punished if get caught. At the behavioral level, individuals lied to different extents. Besides, individuals who are more dishonest showed shorter lying response time, whereas no significant correlation was found between truth‐telling response time and the degree of dishonesty. At the neural level, the left caudate, ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) were key regions reflecting individual differences in making dishonest decisions. The dishonesty associated activity in these regions decreased with increased dishonesty. Subsequent generalized psychophysiological interaction analyses showed that individual differences in self‐serving lying were associated with the functional connectivity among the caudate, vmPFC, IFG, and dlPFC. More importantly, regardless of the decision types, the neural patterns of the left caudate and vmPFC during the decision‐making phase could be used to predict individual degrees of dishonesty. The present study demonstrated that lying decisions differ substantially from person to person in the functional connectivity and neural activation patterns which can be used to predict individual degrees of dishonesty.

Neural mechanisms of deception in a social context: an fMRI replication study

“…In particular, deception is usually accompanied by increased activity in the frontal and parietal areas, which are associated with a combination of processes. All of these processes can explain higher cognitive load of deception: conflict monitoring, working memory, action selection, and inhibition 2,8,[14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] . Another reported neural correlate of deception is the error detection mechanism 25,26 .…”

“…An additional aspect of deception was brought to attention due to the development of ecologically valid paradigms in the area of deception research. In these paradigms, unlike in previous studies, participants were making decisions on whether to lie or tell the truth to an interlocutor throughout the experiment 6,18,21,22,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33] . The deliberate choice to deceive required evaluation of the current situation and possible outcomes and, in particular, inferring the mental state of the opponent to create a false belief.…”

Collaborations and deceptions in strategic interactions revealed by hyperscanning fMRI

“…However, people lie in daily lives as voluntary or spontaneous, so the findings from instructed lies may be 'lacking ecological validity ' (e.g., pp. 1102, in Yin & Weber, 2019. In spontaneous lying paradigms, in contrast, experimenters designed novel or creative contexts (see Fig.…”

“…Besides paradigmatic and contextual differences, another layer of complexity that accompanied the relative scarcity of hyperscanning neuroimaging studies, is the relative limited methodologies adopted: most cited fMRI studies deployed univariate (e.g., general linear model or GLM) or region-of-analysis methods (e.g., Abe & Greene, 2014;Ito et al, 2012;Lisofsky, Kazzer, Heekeren, & Prehn, 2014;Sun et al, 2017;Vartanian et al, 2013;Wu, Loke, Xu, & Lee, 2011;Yin et al, 2016), with few recent exceptions utilizing connectivity (Jiang et al, 2015;Speer et al, 2020) and multivariate approaches (Jin et al, 2009;Yin & Weber, 2019). In comparison, in the present study, GLM contrast, psychophysiological interactions (PPI, O'Reilly, Woolrich, Behrens, Smith, & Johansen-Berg, 2012), and multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA, Kriegeskorte, Goebel, & Bandettini, 2006) were adopted to identify patterns of task-or seed-driven activity throughout the brain, plus the subsequent principal component analysis (PCA) that reduced the high-dimensionality problems in MVPA analysis, expanding the perspectives of data examination and joint constraints of the result interpretations.…”

“…In spontaneous lying paradigms, in contrast, experimenters designed novel or creative contexts (see Fig. 1 for the listed games in the category) where incentives, such as attractive monetary rewards (Yin, Reuter, & Weber, 2016;Yin & Weber, 2019), or appearing 'uncaught-ness' (Speer, Smidts, & Boksem, 2020), to induce participants to spontaneously lie.…”