Every time Pinocchio lied his nose grew, making it harder and harder for him to be untruthful. For humans, though, it turns out it's kind of the opposite. While lying got harder for Pinocchio over time, a new study found lying actually gets easier for humans the more we do it because lying changes our brains. Yikes!
A study published in Nature Neuroscience found the part of our brain the elicits emotional responses, the amygdala, responds less and less the more we lie. Basically, with every lie you tell, you get that twisted-gut guilty feeling less.
To see what happens to the brain when we lie, researchers set up different scenarios based around a jar of pennies. The 80 people in the study were given different scenarios and had to report to their partner how much change was in the jar. In some scenarios, lying benefited both the subject and the partner, and in others lying only benefitted the subject. By monitoring peoples' brains as they told their partner the truth or a lie, researchers found that the amygdala reacted less with each lie. Lies that benefited the subject got even less reaction from the amygdala, which means we're basically hardwired to lie when it's in our own self-interest.
That's typically not how we like to think of ourselves, though. None of us wants to imagine our lying reptile brains as representative of our overall personalities. That could be why our brain reacts less to lies of self-interest, researchers found. In a briefing, researcher Tali Sharot from the department of experimental psychology at University College London explained what this means.
Are You Right-Brained? Find Out In the Video Below:
“Part of the emotional arousal we see when people lie is because of the conflict between how people see themselves and their actions,” Tali said, according to Time. “So I lie for self-benefit, but at the same time it doesn’t fit the way I want to view myself, which is as an honest person. It’s possible that we learn from the arousal signal…with less emotional arousal, perhaps I’m less likely to see the act as incongruent with my own self perception.”
What this study also confirms, as Time points out, is that saying "once a liar always a liar" might be true, which is unfortunate because being dishonest sucks. We want people in our lives to tell us the truth so that we can build trust, which is essential in all our relationships. If you or someone in your life is lying frequently and easily, it's hard to build that trust.
So the bottom line is, if you don't lie, don't start. If you have been lying, you should probably stop so your brain starts giving you that red-flag warning each time you're untruthful. That mechanism is there for a reason.
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