Honesty

The cognitive perspective on honesty holds that deception is cognitively more demanding than truth telling. Attempted deception is associated with the activation of executive brain regions (particularly the prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices), while truthful responding has not been shown to be associated with any areas of increased activation (relative to deception). This chapter discusses the recent findings regarding the cognitive correlates of deception and proposes a framework for understanding the neural mechanisms that allow people to tell lies. We explore lying from a developmental perspective and describe the findings obtained from cognitive and neuroimaging studies. Finally, in the last sections, we discusses the findings on pathological lying, on the moral brain, and on future research directions in the cognitive neuroscience of honesty.