A new study shows that small lies will lead to bigger lies. As human tell more and more lies, our brain will adapt it and just get used to lying.
"You can think of this as a slippery slope with what begins as small acts of dishonesty escalating to much larger ones," said study lead author Neil Garrett , now a neuroscience researcher at Princeton University. "It highlights the potential dangers of engaging in small acts of dishonesty on a regular basis because these can escalate to much larger ones further down the line," he added.
Neuroscientists at the University College London's Affective Brain Lab put 80 individuals in situations where they could repeatedly lie and get paid more based on the extent of their lies. They said they were the are the first to show empirically that people's lies grow bolder the more they fabricate a truth.
Everyone lies even just once in a while. Sometimes, reasonable white lies are acceptable. But dishonesty has been difficult to study. Using brain scanners in laboratories, researchers have sometimes instructed subjects to lie in order to see what their brains were doing.
A functional MRI scanning device monitored brain activity, with the researchers concentrating on the amygdala, an area associated with emotional response. Amygdala is is an almond-shape set of neurons located deep in the brain's medial temporal lobe.
"The more we lie, the less likely we are to have an emotional response" - say, shame or guilt - "that accompanies it," said study co-author and lab director Tali Sharot.
The study showed how we get used to the lying, much like the brain is skillful to tell lies than the truth. It shows people's brains adapting to their own wrongdoing. The researchers found out that there is a part of people who don't lie and don't make small lies lead to bigger lies, but Sharot and Garrett weren't able to discover 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 benefit alone.
