ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2014
Response to anticipated reward in the nucleus accumbens predicts behavior in an independent test of honesty.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 42 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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42 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 97 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Reduced neural specificity for a romantic partner in the nucleus accumbens over relationship duration.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Social connectedness mediates the effect of awe in reducing dishonest behavior.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Neurocomputational mechanisms of personal benefits and justifications in moral decision-making.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Unraveling the neural basis of repeated moral decisions with mouse tracking and fMRI.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Distinguishing deception from its confounds by improving the validity of fMRI-based neural prediction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Neural basis of reward expectancy inducing proactive aggression.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- An Examination of the Motives for Attributing and Interpreting Deception in People with Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment.Journal of Intelligence · 2024Article
- To lie or to tell the truth? The influence of processing the opponent's feedback on the forthcoming choice.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex regulates default prosociality preference.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Morality in the flesh: on the link between bodily self-consciousness, moral identity and (dis)honest behaviour.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- The prefrontal cortex and (uniquely) human cooperation: a comparative perspective.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Review
- Cognitive Control Promotes Either Honesty or Dishonesty, Depending on One's Moral Default.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Article
- The Difference Spotting Task: A new nonverbal measure of cheating behavior.Behavior research methods · 2021Article
- Human moral decision-making through the lens of Parkinson's disease.NPJ Parkinson's disease · 2021Review
- Motivated Interpretations of Deceptive Information.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- Prosocial Gains and Losses: Modulations of Human Social Decision-Making by Loss-Gain Context.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- The Role of Reward System in Dishonest Behavior: A Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Study.Brain topography · 2021Article
- Overriding a moral default for honesty or dishonesty.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
This study examines the cognitive and neural determinants of honesty and dishonesty. Human subjects undergoing fMRI completed a monetary incentive delay task eliciting responses to anticipated reward in the nucleus accumbens. Subjects next performed an incentivized prediction task, giving them real and repeated opportunities for dishonest gain. Subjects attempted to predict the outcomes of random computerized coin-flips and were financially rewarded for accuracy. In some trials, subjects were rewarded based on self-reported accuracy, allowing them to gain money dishonestly by lying. Dishonest behavior was indexed by improbably high levels of self-reported accuracy. Nucleus accumbens response in the first task, involving only honest rewards, accounted for ∼25% of the variance in dishonest behavior in the prediction task. Individuals showing relatively strong nucleus accumbens responses to anticipated reward also exhibited increased dorsolateral prefrontal activity (bilateral) in response to opportunities for dishonest gain. These results address two hypotheses concerning (dis)honesty. According to the "Will" hypothesis, honesty results from the active deployment of self-control. According to the "Grace" hypothesis, honesty flows more automatically. The present results suggest a reconciliation between these two hypotheses while explaining (dis)honesty in terms of more basic neural mechanisms: relatively weak responses to anticipated rewards make people morally "Graceful," but individuals who respond more strongly may resist temptation by force of Will.
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