Cognitive Control Helps Cheaters To Stay Honest — And Honest People To Cheat

By Emma Young Many of us are faced with daily temptations to cheat. You might be offered the chance to download pirated music, perhaps. Or you might wonder about passing your child off as younger than they are, to avoid buying them a ticket on public transport. As the authors of a new paper, published in PNAS, point out, several lines of research propose that cognitive control is needed for us to resolve the conflict between wanting to cheat and wanting to be honest. We need, in other words, to make an effort to rein in our impulses. However, the new work, led by Sebastian Speer at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, shows that this means different things for different people. If you’re typically honest, cognitive control can turn you into a cheat. The team recruited 40 young adults (aged 18-35) who were told they were taking part in a study into visual search (a later survey confirmed that none realised it was really about cheating). While in an MRI scanner, they were shown a series of pairs of “spot the difference” images — the sort you can find in any kids’ puzzle book. They were told that there were three differences between each pair (the colour in one region might be different in one of the images, for example, or an item included in one was missing from the other). All that participants had to do was signal if and when they’d spotted these three differences, and they’d receive a small monetary reward. If they couldn’t find the ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Brain Decision making Lying Source Type: blogs