ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Cognitive control increases honesty in cheaters but cheating in those who are honest.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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25 citing papers in PubMed, 83 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Intuition or Deliberation? The Effects of Decision-Making Modes on Adolescents' Honest Behaviors: The Moderating Roles of Honesty Tendencies and Victim Situations.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Neurocomputational mechanisms of personal benefits and justifications in moral decision-making.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Honesty threshold affects individuals' resistance to monetary temptations.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Unraveling the neural basis of repeated moral decisions with mouse tracking and fMRI.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Competition increases the magnitude of dishonest reporting even when controlling for reward uncertainty.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- 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
- Behavioral dishonesty in multiscenes: Associations with trait honesty and neural patterns during (dis)honesty video-watching.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- An Examination of the Motives for Attributing and Interpreting Deception in People with Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment.Journal of Intelligence · 2024Article
- The Effect of Comparative Direction and Comparative Gap on Self-Deception.Psychology research and behavior management · 2024Article
- Cathodal HD-tDCS above the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex increases environmentally sustainable decision-making.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Article
- The Relationship Between Cognitive Resource Consumption During Gameplay and Postgame Aggressive Behaviors: Between-Subjects Experiment.JMIR serious games · 2023Article
- The path of dishonesty: identification of mental processes with electrical neuroimaging.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- The acute effects of stress on dishonesty are moderated by individual differences in moral default.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Self-deception: Distorted metacognitive process in ambiguous contexts.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Vigilant Attention, Cerebral Blood Flow and Grey Matter Volume Change after 36 h of Acute Sleep Deprivation in Healthy Male Adults: A Pilot Study.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- Morality in the flesh: on the link between bodily self-consciousness, moral identity and (dis)honest behaviour.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Neural mechanisms of deliberate dishonesty: Dissociating deliberation from other control processes during dishonest behaviors.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- 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
- Human moral decision-making through the lens of Parkinson's disease.NPJ Parkinson's disease · 2021Review
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3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Every day, we are faced with the conflict between the temptation to cheat for financial gains and maintaining a positive image of ourselves as being a "good person." While it has been proposed that cognitive control is needed to mediate this conflict between reward and our moral self-image, the exact role of cognitive control in (dis)honesty remains elusive. Here we identify this role, by investigating the neural mechanism underlying cheating. We developed a task which allows for inconspicuously measuring spontaneous cheating on a trial-by-trial basis in the MRI scanner. We found that activity in the nucleus accumbens promotes cheating, particularly for individuals who cheat a lot, while a network consisting of posterior cingulate cortex, temporoparietal junction, and medial prefrontal cortex promotes honesty, particularly in individuals who are generally honest. Finally, activity in areas associated with cognitive control (anterior cingulate cortex and inferior frontal gyrus) helped dishonest participants to be honest, whereas it enabled cheating for honest participants. Thus, our results suggest that cognitive control is not needed to be honest or dishonest per se but that it depends on an individual's moral default.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.