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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.
Nah, they had to exclude her from the study, her readings were off the chart...
...and she voted for the Iraq War. Donald Trump did not vote for the Iraq War, was against it, and said so. I hear people have tapes of Donald Trump saying he was for the Iraq War. It's all fabrications, all lies. Donald Trump does not tell lies. Donald Trump is a very honest person, very decent person. The best. The best. And all these people faking audio tapes, making all these fraudulent, phony, tapes, are all linked to Hillary's campaign rigging the election. All these people coming out of nowhere, saying "Trump, even though I never met him, he was for the war, I heard him say so on the radio." No witnesses. All lies. It's a huge scam, people, a huge scam. Donald Trump exhibits only a narrow subset of normal human behaviors which does NOT INCLUDE PATHOLOGICAL LYING but does include referring to himself in the third person- that makes me smart.
I consider myself to be on the Autism Spectrum scale. When I tell stories I want to be detailed; but I have learned that people don't want the full story and prefer summaries. Summaries so short that I more or less have to reinvent the scenario in order to get my point or question out and paid attention to. Since it's not the complete truth; it's a lie. But I want to tell the complete truth but people don't want to hear all the details and angles. It's a profound discrepancy in human communication that I have adapted to; the lie that communicates the essential but not exact truth. Is it a lie when people want/expect you to actually do it?
Lying isn't black and white. You have to interpret how much and what information a person is looking for. You are then lying only when you know what information a person is looking for and if they would care about the inaccuracy of the statement.
This might possibly make some sense of my general view that I have about lying, which is that it's not quite as simple as "honest people" and "dishonest people". I'm sure there are some people who are truly dishonest, in that they've thought very clearly about what the truth is and are being intentionally deceptive. However, I know a number of people where I'd be more inclined to say that they're just not really thinking about it.
That might sound weird or a little nonsensical, but what I mean is, there's a certain level of mental activity to "be honest". It's not just about the courage to voice your opinion, but also whether you go through a certain kind of thought process. To give a common example, if you ask your coworker, "How are you doing?" there's a decent chance that person will say, "Good" without even thinking about it. They might be miserable, but it's not necessarily an intentional deception. Maybe you're just being polite, or you don't want to share. Or maybe you're just responding because that's the proper conventional response to the question.
To give a slightly more complex example, if I ask what your favorite movie is, you might just say "Pulp Fiction" even though that's not your favorite movie. Maybe it's a movie that came to mind that you liked. Maybe it was a movie that your decided was your favorite movie well over a decade ago, and you've just used that as your answer when people ask, even though there are other movies you like better. Or maybe you said "Pulp Fiction" just because you thought it was a good answer that other people would agree with.
I used to think that it was as simple as "being honest" or "being dishonest", but I've realized over the years that a lot of times, we just end up giving whatever answer is quick and easy, or the safe answer that won't cause trouble. Some people do it more than others, and I've known a few people for whom communication isn't really about conveying information, but more about social maneuvering. And I don't even mean that it's malicious, since it may be as innocent as just saying whatever will get you to like them and make everyone get along. I think it's not even necessarily an intentional deception, but instead it's more like they're not even thinking about the truth content of their answer in the context of "true" or "false", but more like "achieves the desired effect" or "doesn't achieve the desired effect".
So I'm rambling a little, but I wonder if the amygdala has a role in the evaluation of truth content. If my general thought is correct, it'd be reasonable to think that there's some part of the brain with is being under-used in people who "end up giving whatever answer is quick and easy".
You know, where the character is actively rewarded for, and celebrates some 'negative' ethical attribute? Dungeon Keeper, God of War, most action video games, etc.
Well, if they're paying you money to lie, and more money to lie bigger, then seems to me that's the same dynamic. It's a reward loop, with a context. Doesn't seem to me that this would be any more likely to cause an increase in general preference for lying, than the millions who played Dungeon Keeper being more likely to turn to workplace abuse as a first resort.
That said, context adds a lot - the classic Stanford Prison experiment and similar studies showed how far context and roles can push people with very little prodding.
Seems to me, that more thought should be put into what roles we're building for folks, especially with things like the stock market, the legal system, and managerial roles. Unbounded reward loops have a way of being pushed until something really bad breaks, even with 'normal' people.
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.