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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.

3 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I hear Hillary participated in this study by x0ra · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nah, they had to exclude her from the study, her readings were off the chart...

  2. Re:I hear Hillary participated in this study by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...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.

  3. But what is a lie? by BlueCoder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.