Spontaneous dishonesty does not specifically engage the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex

Reply to Zhen and Yu: Cognitive control as questionable proxy for deliberation in honest behaviors

“…Finally, in agreement with Zhen and Yu ( 2 ), we don't contest that honesty can be as motivational as dishonesty. On the contrary, we stress, in the original paper ( 1 ), and here again, the neglect of such a research question in the current literature, and call for more research on this motivational dimension, which we believe plays a nonnegligible role in both honesty and dishonesty.…”

“…Further, Zhen and Yu ( 2 ) seem to believe their new analysis (relying on the inclusion of four new studies based on different criteria) does not support the view that spontaneous dishonesty is more volitional than spontaneous truth telling, which, to our understanding, they seem to have understood to be our main research objective. However, we would like to stress that our main tenet is that cognitive control brain regions are not the appropriate diagnostic for deliberative processes, and we show that recruitment of cognitive control brain regions is likely due to cognitive demands other than deliberation (e.g., executing instructed behaviors).…”

“…In their letter, Zhen and Yu ( 2 ) state our paper ( 1 ) contains various flaws. First, we have supposedly inflated our results by using bigger samples sizes than those in the original studies.…”