A little lie may make you a big liar

London, Oct 25: Telling self–serving lies may gradually lead people

to a bigger one and filly push them down a slippery slope where their

brains may start to adapt to the dishonesty, making deceit look much

easier, an interesting study has revealed. The findings showed that

telling small lies desensitises our brains to the associated negative

emotions and may encourage us to tell bigger lies in future. Further,

amygdala — a part of the brain associated with emotion — was found to be

most active when people first lied for their persol gain.

The amygdala’s response to lying declined with every lie while the

magnitude of the lies escalated. Larger drops in amygdala activity

predicted bigger lies in future, the researchers said.

“When we lie for persol gain, our amygdala produces a negative

feeling that limits the extent to which we are prepared to lie,” said

Tali Sharot from University College London (UCL). “However, this

response fades as we continue to lie, and the more it falls the bigger

our lies become. This may lead to a ‘slippery slope’ where small acts of

dishonesty escalate into more significant lies,” Sharot observed.

For the study, the team included 80 volunteers who took part in a

team estimation task that involved guessing the number of pennies in a

jar and sending their estimates to unseen partners using a computer.

Participants were told that aiming for the most accurate estimate

would benefit them and their partner and over–estimating the amount

would benefit the volunteer at their partner’s expense.

The results revealed that people started by slightly exaggerating

their estimates which elicited strong amygdala responses. Their

exaggerations escalated as the experiment went on while their amygdala

responses declined.

The researchers only tested dishonesty in this experiment, but the

same principle may also apply to escalations in other actions such as

risk taking or violent behaviour, they stated, in the study. (IANS)