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The Neuropsychology of Lies, Deception and Dishonesty: A Continuum?

This essay journeys into a complex frontal lobe function of human behaviour: deception and lying. It opens with mythology, evolution and human development, and will touch on deontic reasoning and theory of mind. Further, it discusses underlying executive prefrontal functions including working memory, attention, conflict monitoring, decision making, inhibition, and moral conflicts. Various frontal lobe regions are involved in these functions: the dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortices, the anterior prefrontal cortex, the right inferior frontal gyrus, and the anterior cingulate cortex. The essay argues that lying is part of human nature and that dishonesty can be understood as a continuum: On one end, developmental delays convey different honesty patterns and on the other end, neurodegenerative diseases, structural differences or damage result in deviant examples of deception.

In lore, mythology and religion, deception is a pivotal human behaviour with great ramifications for philosophy and law. Homer’s Odyssey is full of scheming and trickeries. The story teaches that dishonesty needs to be disciplined, however that not all lying is immoral; it ever so often benefits humankind and is necessary for survival. Research of dishonesty enmeshes some astute study designs that themselves read like a thriller at times.

Deception comes in many shapes and forms: Machiavellian exploitation, self- serving lies, white lies, and altruistic dishonesty. Deception can be seen as a form of problem solving within the complexities of social human relationships. Lying is defined as articulating something to another person that is known to the articulator to be untrue (Fallis, 2009). From an evolutionary standpoint, deception is necessary for interaction between an individual and the social group; in families, tribes, and countries. Higher skills in deception can be advantageous in order to increase reproduction, ease social conflicts, and build alliances for prospering (Adenzato & Ardito, 1999). Yet, dishonesty also creates new sets of problems: it instils mistrust, allows and maintains crime, and can be harmful and detrimental to society. Therefore, the relevance and high interest of research on deception is significant in forensic settings, social and behavioural sciences.

From a developmental perspective, lying is a milestone in childhood. Cognitively, deception encompasses skilled executive functioning and the processes of deontic reasoning and theory of mind (Adenzato & Ardito, 1999). A child develops her first lies between age 2 and 3. Earlier, she is not aware of the social rules and consequences of trespassing. The development of theory of mind enables the child to take the perspective of another person, thus increasing her ability to deceive in a dexterous manner. A child’s degree of executive functioning determined the behaviour of telling or not telling the experimenter if they forbiddingly peeked at a toy (Evans & Lee, 2013). The ability to deceive depends on inhibition: one has to inhibit the truth to emerge in the preference of a lie. Additionally, as shown during the shape stroop task, working memory was needed to foresee the child’s lying capability. The progress of deception over the lifespan presents itself in an inverted u-shape. Quantity, quality and speed of lying increases from early childhood on, peaks during adolescence and early adulthood, then decreases towards old age (Debey, Schryver, Logan, Suchotzki, & Verschuere, 2015). These researchers conclude that those measures correlate with the same pattern found in inhibitory control over the lifespan. Hence, lying is part of early child development and aberrations and aging of the brain present themselves in differences in lying.

Decision making and social behaviour are key foundations of deception. Both involve highly sophisticated executive functions of the frontal lobe. Seminal research by Langleben et al. (2002) applying the Guilty Knowledge Task (GKT) and a first review of fMRI studies by Spence et al. (2004) have formed the theory that truth telling appears to be the baseline condition, whereas lying requires greater brain activation, as shown in higher BOLD signals on fMRIs in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). This increased activation indicates the inhibition process taking place, and creating the lie. The DLPFT is further involved in working memory and attention (Curtis & D’Esposito, 2003). Competition among responses and overriding information are also part of deception. The ACC occupies the key position between the limbic system and the prefrontal system and engages to monitor conflicting information (Botvinick, Cohen, & Carter, 2004). Abe et al. (2006) have further affirmed the involvement of the ACC and the DLPFC via PET scanning, showing differences in activation when participants pretended not to know the answer to a question of a previously completed task. Much of this earlier research was experimentally instructed lying, therefore Karim et al. (2010) designed a role-playing game with personal gains involved for passing the GKT to examine a more naturalistic form of deception. His team used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC) to influence the proficiency of lying in their participants. Contrary to their hypothesis it was the inhibitory current that increased deception capabilities, not how the researchers expected by exciting the aPFC. This experiment led to the hypothesis that inhibition of the aPFC might reduce moral conflicts, as participants were feeling less guilty about deceiving and became therefore better and faster at it. One of the most recent studies is describing continuously more complex neurological findings: self- serving lying is reflected by various activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), the right inferior frontal gyrus (BA 44) and the DLPFC (Yin & Weber, 2019). Not surprising, the VMPFC is involved in decision-making (Kalat, 2018) and the BA 44 is part of the Broca’s area involved in suppressing verbal response tendencies (Vartanian, Kwantes, & Mandel, 2012). These studies illustrate a multifaceted picture of activation and function in the prefrontal cortex involved in deceitful decision-making, cognitive control and attention.

When deception is apprehended as a continuum where too much honesty as well as too much dishonesty deviates from the normal, it implies looking at examples where deception diverges from the norm. Autistic children have different developmental trajectories than normally developing children, especially in theory of mind. In regard to lying it has been found that overall, they tended to deceive others less and they lacked semantic leakage control, meaning they were less able to cover up their initial lies (Li, Kelley, Evans, & Lee, 2011; Yang et al., 2017). A similar inability to deceive was found in Parkinsons’s patients, where PET imaging illustrated a hypometabolism in the prefrontal cortex that seemed to disrupt their ability to lie, rendering them honest or even hurtfully frank (Abe et al., 2009). Moreover, it is not only the ability to lie but also the ability to detect dishonesty that is crucial for social interactions. Behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) patients displayed impaired theory of mind and were less able to read emotions and therefore detect sarcasm and deception (Shany-Uret al., 2012). In one case study of bvFTD, a patient got progressively worse in many behavioural aspects, but remarkably he started to increasingly make up stories about himself, lying to everyone without remorse. Neuropsychological testing revealed impairments in decision-making, planning, affective theory of mind and verbal working memory (Poletti, Borelli, & Bonuccelli, 2011). Damage in the VMPFC by the Korsakoff’s syndrome resulted in confabulation (Hebscher & Gilboa, 2016) and Machiavellian inclinations increased with brain injury in that area (Cohen-Zimerman, Chau, Krueger, Gordon, & Grafman, 2017). Pathological liars who were otherwise healthy but met the deceitfulness criteria on the DSM-IV, showed increased prefrontal white matter and decreased prefrontal grey matter via MRI scanning (Yang, et al., 2005). This is an intriguing finding as the advantages of increased white matter correlates with the advantages of deception, yet at this extreme end is concerning in a social context. As to the causality of this finding, Spence (2005) pondered if increased white prefrontal cortex matter predisposes to increased lying, or if a high frequency of lying increases the connections between the different prefrontal areas, resulting in more white matter. Maybe the latter is valid, as Brockstaele et al. (2012) found that as deception is using more resources in the brain than telling the truth, training effects were found because increased prolonged lying resulted in quicker deceptive answers on the Sheffield lie test. Hence, repeated self-serving lying might escalate (Engelmann & Fehr, 2009) if the brain adapts to the level of dishonesty it is exposed to. This could indeed have great consequences for infringing upon rules, moral violations and future crime.

In order to evaluate the translational significance of the neuroscience of deception, it is important to outline the limitations of most studies beforementioned. Even though these studies are all peer-reviewed, most of them rely on relative brain imaging data that averages results across small sample sized groups and applies very different experimental designs. Hence external validity cannot be fully anticipated. Lie- detection has been of great interest for forensic science; adding the dimension of the central nervous system to the peripheral activity measured by polygraphs introduces tempting applications to their field (Langleben & Moriarty, 2013). However, it must be emphasised that experimental study data is not paving the way to applied lie detection. The potential misreading, misinterpretation, gaps of knowledge and error rate and its future implications for individuals and society are too hazardous and unreliable. It would be unethical to use fMRI scanning in a court room setting. Nevertheless, the research so far has been fascinating and debates are ongoing.

Truth telling is the baseline of cognitive functioning and deception transgresses from that baseline as it uses more cognitive resources; this can be seen in increased BOLD signals in fMRIs as well as in longer reaction times. Deception is a sophisticated social problem-solving process, involving (but not limited to) various areas in the prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex. Dishonesty constitutes a continuum as too much or not enough honesty can indicate neurodevelopmental, neurodegenerative, or other pathological conditions.

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