Will Telling Lies Damage Your Brain?

It was obvious with Pinocchio. Every time he told a lie his nose grew longer.

But for the rest of us in real life, the result of telling lies isn’t so evident. If we tell a lie, no loud buzzer goes off and no noisy bells start clanging. Nothing much seems to happen.

But is it possible that there are unseen consequences to dishonesty?

Since lies are carried by speech, and speech originates in the brain, is it possible that telling lies causes changes in the brain that are not outwardly observable? Psychologists Julia Lee and Ashley Hardin wanted to find out.

Lee is an assistant professor at the Steven M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Hardin is an assistant professor of oganizational behavior at Washington University Olin Business School in St. Louis.

Drs. Lee and Hardin set up a series of studies to explore the question of dishonesty, with 250 pairs of individuals. In each pair, one was assigned the task of either lying or telling the truth. The other member of the pair was instructed to evaluate the emotions of the lying or truth-telling partner.

Each of the partners was then assigned the task of evaluating the emotions of the other partner.

The research duo found that subjects who were asked to be dishonest were significantly worse at detecting the emotional state of their partners than those who told the truth. Surprisingly, the small, seemingly unimportant moments of dishonesty clouded an individual’s ability to read the emotions of another individual later on.

In addition, as a further way of testing the effects of dishonesty, the researchers ran additional studies with 1,897 participants in all. In one study, they created conditions where those being tested would be tempted to be dishonest. And in another, the researchers removed any possibility of cheating.

Later, all subjects took part in a game—throwing dice—that allowed participants different choices related to dishonesty. Some ways of scoring required the players to reveal their actual score. Other ways gave players the leeway to dishonestly change their score, in order to make more money. The team found that when players had the opportunity to cheat for more money, they in fact did.

To determine how well the participants could read other people’s emotions, the researchers then had the subjects watch a series of short video clips In the clips, actors expressed a wide range of emotions in their facial expessions, voices, and body language. The participants were then asked to identify the emotional state of the actors.

Once again, across all the experimental studies, the researchers consistently found that those who were tempted to, and likely did, lie ended up performing worse on the test of empathetic accuracy than those who didn’t lie. People who lied couldn’t read other people’s emotions as well as people who told the truth.

We live in a world where businesses, social life, and personal relationships depend on the ability of individuals to interact well with other people. And to interact with them we often need to be able to determine their emotions. Are they really being friendly to us? Or hostile? We need to know. A lot may depend on it!

Deception Essential Reads

When It Comes to Finding a Liar, Honesty Isn't Enough

Deception and Why We Trust Too Much

As most of us learned in kindergarten: It’s important to tell the truth!

(NOTE: Another research scientist involved in this project, Francesca Gino, joined the research team after the project was underway. Some of the data in Gino’s other research appears to have been falsified and misrepresented. No data falsification has been found in the research project about dishonesty, initiated by Drs. Julia Lee and Ashley Harding.)

© David Evans