A sneak peek into the brain of a cheater
Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University
Developing critical, creative, caring and collaborative business leaders who are a force for positive change worldwide.
Tax evasion, insurance fraud or, in relation to Covid-19, the sale of low-quality face masks. It’s these kinds of behaviours that have spurred on a team of researchers from Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM), headed by Dr Sebastian Speer, to unveil what causes dishonesty and honesty. The findings suggest an identified spectrum, from people who are generally honest to people who cheat a lot.
In a series of studies, Dr Speer and his fellow RSM researchers Prof. Ale Smidts and Dr Maarten Boksem, dove into the logistics of dishonest versus honest behaviours. Dishonest behaviour can cause an avalanche of economic costs. Weeding out effective ways to reduce those behaviours is not only beneficial to policy makers and businesses, but also to society. Understanding how different brain activity reveals dishonesty or honesty in various people can help in the development of efficient strategies to reduce cheating and strengthen trust.
Balancing gread and moral self-image
In a first study, the team sought to determine what would motivate a typically honest person to go rogue and cheat. In a discovery article entitled Why honest people cheat , Dr Speer, Prof. Smidts and Dr Boksem measured the brain activity of participants, through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
The researchers used a Spot-the-Difference game to see who was prone to cheat. In this game, participants could cheat repeatedly, deliberately and voluntarily inside the MRI scanner without suspicion of the real purpose of the task. Participants were asked to spot the difference between two cartoon images and were told that there would always be three differences, and that they would be rewarded for each correct answer. However, in actuality and unbeknownst to the participants, there were sometimes only two differences or only one difference between the images. Participants only received financial rewards if they indicated that they found all three differences between the images, without having to point them out. So, when participants reported having found three differences when there were actually less than three present, the researchers knew they were cheating.
When looking at the participants’ brains when they were being honest or dishonest, it was found that dishonesty was mainly driven by activity in brain areas associated with the motivation to obtain rewards, while honesty was driven by activity in brain areas associated with one’s self-image. These results suggest two conflicting motivations: one to obtain benefits and rewards, and another to uphold a positive image of oneself. Crucially, the research pointed to an important, but unexpected, role for cognitive control: increased activity in brain areas associated with control helped participants who cheated a lot to be honest, but also helped honest participants to cheat from time to time. Thus, the study revealed that the role of cognitive control depends on the person’s ‘moral default’.
How does this help a cheater to change their ways? Dr Speer, Prof. Smidts and Dr Boksem’s findings suggest that, in general, strengthening one’s skills of reflecting on one’s own moral image could increase honesty, while increasing cognitive control capacity would help a cheater to become more honest (but may backfire for those already honest).
In the brain of a cheater
The results from a second study were announced in a press release, Our brains reveal whether we are honest or a cheater. on 6 January 2022. This study dived into the differences between individuals in the propensity to cheat. The findings showed that, when at rest, an honest person’s brain is more strongly interconnected, particularly between areas responsible for self-referential thinking and reward processing, in comparison to a cheater’s brain. This means that, using brain scans, it is possible to detect cheaters even before they engage in dishonest behaviour.
What’s new?
These studies are the first of its kind to measure the neural mechanisms that lead to dishonesty. Thanks to the technology used in this study, the RSM research team could gain deep insights into, among others:
Most noteworthy was the involvement of brain areas responsible for cognitive control. But having control over our actions and motivations doesn’t guarantee we’ll be honest. Dr Speer and his team discovered that it’s this control that enables people who are usually honest to cheat, while it facilitates honest decision making for cheaters. Go figure!
Possible business applications
There is no one-size-fits-all solution. People, and their motivations for being honest or dishonest, differ greatly from one person to the next. An example of how to turn a dishonest person around? Asking them to think long and hard about the consequences of their actions might increase that person’s cognitive control and help them decide to be honest. But, beware! The opposite is typically true for a naturally honest person. When they start to think about using dishonesty as an option, they just might decide that that path makes sense.
Is honesty always the best policy? Do cheaters never really prosper? Evidently, in varying degrees and under certain circumstances, yes to both.
Interesting to know: