Telling little lies desensitizes our brain. He no longer feels negative emotions and encourages us to tell bigger stories.
Lying is wrong. Everyone knows it. But we must admit that a lie here and there makes life easier. Truth concealed or made up, little canard not very bad … As you grow up, you learn that not all truth is good to say. We also learn that once the finger is in the gear, a vicious circle is set in motion. From the little lie of nothing at all, we start telling bigger stories to bury the previous ones … The fault of our brain which takes a liking to it, ensures a study published in Nature Neuroscience.
To come to this astonishing conclusion, the researchers scanned the brains of 80 volunteers as they took part in a game in which they could lie for personal gain, or tell the truth. The task was to assess the number of pieces belonging to his opponent. If the player overestimated the sum, he won money and his opponent lost money.
They then discovered that an area of the brain responsible for emotional memory, the amygdala, was very active during the first lie. The amplitude of the amygdala’s response then seems to decline as the lies pile up, and most importantly, the sales pitch gets bigger.
The brain is desensitized
“When we lie for ourselves, our amygdala produces a negative feeling that is supposed to limit our propensity to lie,” explains Dr Tali Sharot of the Department of Experimental Psychology at University College London (Great Britain). However, the response fades away when we continue to lie, and the more the amygdala’s reaction fades, the more prominent our fables become. This takes us down a “soapy slope” where petty acts of dishonesty escalate. “
For researchers, these repeated lies desensitize our brains by reducing the negative emotions induced by lying. “This proves that the amygdala is the one that signals us to acts that we should consider bad or immoral, notes Dr. Neil Garret, one of the authors of the study. We only tested lies in this experiment, but the same mechanism can apply to escalating risk-taking or violent behavior ”.
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