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Study Finds Little Lies Lead To Bigger Ones (go.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: Telling little fibs leads down a slippery slope to bigger lies -- and our brains adapt to escalating dishonesty, which makes deceit easier, a new study shows. Neuroscientists at the University College London's Affective Brain Lab put 80 people in scenarios where they could repeatedly lie and get paid more based on the magnitude of their lies. They said they were the first to demonstrate empirically that people's lies grow bolder the more they fib. The researchers then used brain scans to show that our mind's emotional hot spot -- the amygdala -- becomes desensitized or used to the growing dishonesty, according to a study published online Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience. And during this lying, brain scans that show blood supply and activity at the amygdala decrease with increasing lies, said study co-author and lab director Tali Sharot. "The more we lie, the less likely we are to have an emotional response" -- say, shame or guilt -- "that accompanies it," Sharot said. Garrett said he suspects similar escalation factors happen in the "real world," which would include politics, infidelity and cheating, but he cautioned that this study was done in a controlled lab setting so more research would be needed to apply it to other situations. The study found that there is a segment of people who don't lie and don't escalate lies, but Sharot and Garrett weren't able to determine how rare those honest people are. It also found that people lie more when it benefits both them and someone else than when they just profit alone.
I vote Hillary For Prison 2016!
If you or I did the same thing with classified information, our asses would be in prison. To not want Hillary tried for the same crime(s) is a total rejection of the concept of rule of law. By supporting that you are supporting a ruling class of well-connected people who can get away with just about anything.
These sort of comments might be funny but they aren't at all accurate. If one looks for example at Hillary's Politifact rating she has a larger fraction of true or mostly true statements than most major politicians (and way, way more than Donald Trump who has many more totally false or Pants on Fire statements than most politicians). See http://www.politifact.com/personalities/hillary-clinton/. Politifact does have some issues; they decide what statements to rate, and there's some amount of subjectivity in the ratings, such as the difference between true and mostly true, or between false and mostly false, and some of their rulings are definitely arguable (such as their tendency to rate rumors as false simply if they are very unlikely and have zero evidence) but even if you move half of her statements from each category one category down, she still well within the normal range for politicians.