Why Dishonesty Becomes Easy for People
Why are some people often habitual in their behavior of deceit?
Society might say the biggest reasons are poor character and the success that people have in being dishonest. That isn’t wrong yet research has dived deeper for answers and meaning and found the development of that habit is made easier by emotions.
“What does emotion have to do with dishonesty? The brain’s emotion network responds less and less with each additional lie. The greater the drop in the brain’s sensitivity to dishonesty, the more people lied the next time they got a chance.”
Tali Sharot
Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience
Department of Experimental Psychology at University College London
and
Neil Garrett
Sir Henry Wellcome Research Fellow conducting research
at Oxford University and Princeton University
So dishonesty becomes easier the more we succumb to or indulge in it. Our brain becomes less bothered by the act. We start telling ourselves stories about how we’re either not being deceptive or we become less concerned with how we’re acting.
If the rewards — protective or creating advantage, are sufficiently satisfying, then that can certainly help reinforce our attraction to being dishonest.
Research has also shown that dishonesty as a habit leads to lowered empathy, thereby making it even easier to continue being dishonest or exploitative.
“…reduction in empathetic accuracy as a result of dishonesty can have downstream consequences: specifically, participants who cheated for a financial gain were more likely to blatantly dehumanize the actors who appeared in these videos (that is, they rated the actors as less human) than those who did not have the opportunity to cheat. Moreover, cheaters were also more likely to engage in repeated unethical behavior. This result suggests that once we engage in dishonest behavior, we may also distance ourselves from other people by regarding them as less human, which allows us to continue down a path of subsequent, repeated unethical behavior.”
Scientific American
How Dishonesty Drains You
Julia Lee, Ashley Hardin, Bidhan Parmar and Francesca Gino
So why is all this important?
Gaining fuller understanding can help us understand the mindsets of chronically dishonest people.
It can provide a road map for either helping them rewire their psychology and corrective beliefs, attitudes, impulses and selfish, destructive behavior or aiding our decision making to divest ourselves from the offenders, understanding the high probability of the consequences of remaining in close proximity to them.
Michael Toebe is a specialist for reputation relations and crisis management, serving organizations and high-profile individuals. He authors and publishes the weekly Reputation Times newsletter (published on Medium and LinkedIn), the Michael Toebe Newsletter (published through Twitter), is the host of the Reputation Talk podcast (on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Anchor and Spotify) and the author of the recent manuscript, Reputation Crisis, a Conversational, Professional, Problem Solving Guide. On LinkedIn and Twitter.
