The Fascinating Reason Why Liars Keep On Lying.
Most of us will squirm a little, but may also lie a little, if someone asks us a difficult question such as how they look in a new outfit. No one really wants to honestly say the outfit is a disaster, or it makes the person look huge. So, some glib comment like, “It’s just your color” comes to the rescue in what we might call a “white lie.”
But what happens if we find ourselves telling a real lie about something? All sorts of circumstances may have happened to cause us to lie, but we are still stuck with the reality of it, and the guilty feelings.
Lying Changes the Brain
Now, Scientific American is telling us what else happens when we lie. They say a new study has found lying gets easier for humans the more they lie, because lying changes the brain!
Nature Neuroscience reported a study of the amygdala, the part of the brain dealing with emotional responses. The researchers said the amygdala shows up less and less, as we lie more and more. Essentially, our guilt feelings tend to weaken and shrink.
Also lies that helped the person telling the lie may draw even less response from the amygdala. Other researchers point out how much we dislike thinking of ourselves as liars.
I have seen people do this, inventing elaborate justifications explaining why lying was the only way to handle a difficult situation. In the long run, it would have been better to just avoid lying in the first place.
Pitfalls of Lying
The fact that there seems to be less emotional response with repeat lies reinforces the statement, “once a liar always a liar.” If you think about it, the people you know who lie often fit that pattern. In work situations, it often becomes quickly known who can be counted on to tell it as it is, and who will waffle or outright lie when push comes to shove.
But the real issue of what lies do to relationships may be the reason we should all understand the process and make every effort to not lie. Essentially, lies can turn a relationship into quicksand very quickly. If someone cannot believe you, why would they want to invest time and effort in building a relationship only to have it sabotaged by lying?
So if you are tempted to lie, consider what you might be doing to relationships that you value. Or, if you realize someone is lying to you, you may want to question how much that relationship is really worth.
It’s also important to carry this over into our dealings with our kids, making the point early that lies never work.
https://www.thejoint.com/california/chula-vista/eastlake-31125/202872-what-happens-to-brain-when-we-lie
https://ethicalleadership.nd.edu/news/what-dishonesty-does-to-your-brain-why-lying-becomes-easier-and-easier/
https://www.snexplores.org/article/lying-brain-power-prefrontal-cortex-truth-telling
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2016/oct/how-lying-takes-our-brains-down-slippery-slope
Neuroscientist Uses Brain Scan to See Lies Form.
Daniel Langleben, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, might go down in history as the man who revolutionized lie detection.
Instead of wiring someone up to a machine like the polygraph, which measures the anxiety thought to accompany deception, Langleben has skipped a step: He is looking right into the brain to track a lie while it is taking shape.
Langleben, an Israeli immigrant with ceaseless energy, had never intended to build a modern-day lie-detection machine. His interest in deception came from work he had done with children suffering from attention deficit disorder (ADD). All the research indicated that children with ADD were terrible liars because they couldn't help but blurt out the truth.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15744871
The Brain Adapts to Dishonesty.
Dishonesty is an integral part of our social world, influencing domains ranging from finance and politics to personal relationships. Anecdotally, digressions from a moral code are often described as a series of small breaches that grow over time. Here, we provide empirical evidence for a gradual escalation of self-serving dishonesty and reveal a neural mechanism supporting it. Behaviorally, we show that the extent to which participants engage in self-serving dishonesty increases with repetition. Using fMRI we show that signal reduction in the amygdala is sensitive to the history of dishonest behavior, consistent with adaptation. Critically, the extent of amygdala BOLD reduction to dishonesty on a present decision relative to the last, predicts the magnitude of escalation of self-serving dishonesty on the next decision. The findings uncover a biological mechanism that supports a “slippery slope”: what begins as small acts of dishonesty can escalate into larger instances.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5238933/
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