We’re all told by our parents not to lie – only to see our politicians regularly get away with telling untruths.
But it turns out there may be a scientific explanation – and it’s all in the brain, according to Tali Sharot, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London in England, who specialises in decision-making and emotion.
She and her colleagues Stephanie Lazzaro and Dan Ariely ran a study in 2016 in which they discovered the more people lie, the easier it becomes to lie again.
The study found that the lies people tell fundamentally change our brains.
Creating the lie
A small knot of neurons in the temporal lobe called the amygdala is the brain’s emotional processing centre. In Sharot’s study, 80 people were given the opportunity to lie repeatedly for their financial gain as their cognitive activity was recorded by a brain scanner.
They all began with small lies, each of which triggered a big response in the amygdala. The people in the study were flooded with feelings of guilt, shame and stress. Typically, this sort of arousal in the amygdala sends our hearts racing, makes us sweat, twitch and blush, and produces all the other shifty side effects that indicate someone is not telling the truth, such as speaking too fast or filling up sentences with “ums” and “errs”.
Slippery slope
The more lies participants told, the less the amygdala responded. The lies soon grew bigger and the emotional brain quieter. Eventually, participants were twisting the truth with ease, any feelings of guilt and stress having melted away.
Explains why some people can’t stop telling porkies!
