Neural mechanisms of deliberate dishonesty: Dissociating deliberation from other control processes during dishonest behaviors

Preschoolers' deception related to prefrontal cortex activation: An fNIRS study

Deception is an essential part of children's moral development. Previous developmental studies have shown that children start to deceive at the age of 3 years, and as age increased to 5 years, almost all children were able to deceive for their own benefit. Although behavioral studies have indicated that the emergence and development of deception are related to cognitive abilities, their neural correlates remain poorly understood. Therefore, the present study examined the neural correlates underlying deception in preschool-aged children (N = 89, 44 % boys, age 3.13 to 5.96 years, Han Chinese) using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. A modified hide-and-seek paradigm was applied to elicit deceptive and truth-telling behaviors. The results showed that activation of bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was positively associated with the tendency to deceive an opponent in a competitive game in the 3-year-olds. In addition, 3-year-olds who showed a high tendency to deceive showed the same brain activation in the frontopolar area as 5-year-olds did when engaged in deception, whereas no such effect was found in 3-year-olds who never engaged in deception. These findings underscore the link between preschoolers' deception and prefrontal cortex function.

Does deception involve more cognitive control than truth-telling? Meta-analyses of N2 and MFN ERP studies

A number of psychological theories propose that deception involves more cognitive control than truth-telling. Over the last decades, event-related potentials (ERPs) have been used to unravel this question, but the findings are mixed. To address this controversy, two meta-analyses were conducted to quantify the results of existing studies reporting N2 or medial frontal negativity (MFN) associated with deception. In total, 32 papers consisting of 1091 participants were included, which yielded 32 effect sizes for N2 and 7 effect sizes for MFN. We found that deception was associated with a more negative N2 and MFN than truth-telling with medium and large effect sizes (r = .25 and .51, respectively). We also found that the deception paradigm modulated the results (p = .043), but found no evidence for publication bias. Our findings indicate that deception involves more cognitive control than truth-telling. Our review also identifies gaps in this literature, including a need for more ERP studies using spontaneous deception.

The Role of Cognition in Dishonest Behavior

Dishonesty has received increased attention from many professionals in recent years for its relevance in many social areas such as finance and psychology, among others. Understanding the mechanisms underlying dishonesty and the channels in which dishonesty operates could enable the detection and even prevention of dishonest behavior. However, the study of dishonesty is a challenging endeavor; dishonesty is a complex behavior because it imposes a psychological and cognitive burden. The study of this burden has fostered a new research trend that focuses on cognition’s role in dishonesty. This paper reviews the theoretical aspects of how such cognitive processes modulate dishonest behavior. We will pay special attention to executive functions such as inhibitory processes, working memory, or set-shifting that may modulate the decision to be (dis)honest. We also account for some frameworks in cognitive and social psychology that may help understand dishonesty, such as the Theory of Mind, the role of creative processes, and discourse analyses within language studies. Finally, we will discuss some specific cognitive-based models that integrate cognitive mechanisms to explain dishonesty. We show that cognition and dishonest behavior are firmly related and that there are several important milestones to reach in the future to advance the understanding of dishonesty in our society.

Cognitive control and dishonesty

Dishonesty is ubiquitous and imposes substantial financial and social burdens on society. Intuitively, dishonesty results from a failure of willpower to control selfish behavior. However, recent research suggests that the role of cognitive control in dishonesty is more complex. We review evidence that cognitive control is not needed to be honest or dishonest per se, but that it depends on individual differences in what we call one's 'moral default': for those who are prone to dishonesty, cognitive control indeed aids in being honest, but for those who are already generally honest, cognitive control may help them cheat to occasionally profit from small acts of dishonesty. Thus, the role of cognitive control in (dis)honesty is to override the moral default.

Resting-state functional connectivity of social brain regions predicts motivated dishonesty

Motivated dishonesty is a typical social behavior varying from person to person. Resting-state fMRI (rsfMRI) is capable of identifying unique patterns from functional connectivity (FC) between brain regions. Recent work has built a link between brain networks in resting state to dishonesty in Western participants. To determine and reproduce the relevant neural patterns and build an interpretable model to predict dishonesty, we analyzed two conceptually similar datasets containing rsfMRI data with different dishonesty tasks. Both tasks implemented the information-passing paradigm, in which monetary rewards were employed to induce dishonesty. We applied connectome-based predictive modeling (CPM) to build a model among FC within and between four social brain networks (reward, self-referential, moral, and cognitive control). The CPM analysis indicated that FCs of social brain networks are predictive of dishonesty rate, especially FCs within reward network, and between self-referential and cognitive control networks. Our study offers an conceptual replication with integrated model to predict dishonesty with rsfMRI, and the results suggest that frequent motivated dishonest decisions may require the higher engagement of social brain regions.

Detecting concealed information using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) combined with skin conductance, heart rate, and behavioral measures

In this study, brain imaging data from functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) associated with skin conductance response (SCR), heart rate (HR), and reaction time (RT) were combined to determine if the combination of these indicators could improve the efficiency of deception detection in concealed information test (CIT). During the CIT, participants were presented with a series of names and cities that served as target, probe, or irrelevant stimuli. In the guilty group, the probe stimuli were the participants' own names and hometown cities, and they were asked to deny this information. Our results revealed that probe items were associated with longer RT, larger SCR, slower HR, and higher oxyhemoglobin (HbO) concentration changes in the inferior prefrontal gyrus (IFG), middle frontal gyrus (MFG), and the superior frontal gyrus (SFG) compared with irrelevant items for participants in the guilty group but not in the innocent group. Furthermore, our results suggested that the combination of RT, SCR, HR, and fNIRS indicators could improve the deception detection efficiency to a very high area under the ROC curve (0.94) compared with any of the single indicators (0.74-0.89). The improved deception detection efficiency might be attributed to the reduction of random error and the diversiform underlying the psychophysiological mechanisms reflected by each indicator. These findings demonstrate a feasible way to improve the deception detection efficiency by using combined multiple indicators.

Neural mechanisms of deliberate dishonesty: Dissociating deliberation from other control processes during dishonest behaviors

Numerous studies have sought proof of whether people are genuinely honest by testing whether cognitive control mechanisms are recruited during honest and dishonest behaviors. The underlying assumption is: Deliberate behaviors require cognitive control to inhibit intuitive responses. However, cognitive control during honest and dishonest behaviors can be required for other reasons than deliberation. Across 58 neuroimaging studies (1,211 subjects), we investigated different forms of honest and dishonest behaviors and demonstrated that many brain regions previously implicated in dishonesty may reflect more general cognitive mechanisms. We argue that the motivational/volitional dimension is central to deliberation and provide evidence that motivated dishonest behaviors recruit the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex. This work questions the view that cognitive control is a hallmark of dishonesty.