Ricerc@Sapienza

Honesty is a fundamental moral value that is ranked highly across cultures (Engelmann & Fehr, 2016), yet, people lie for many different reasons and quite often for self-serving goals (Yin & Weber, 2018). Dishonesty is an essentially social act with poorly understood neurobiological correlates (Sip et al, 2012; Langleben et al, 2005). Our study will explore the brain regions responsible for successfully executing a lie and will look at how the risk of losing our social status modulates this activation. For this, we will use the Temptation to Lie Card Game (TLCG adapted from Panasiti et al. (2011)). There will be three main conditions: 1. participants have the choice to lie or not and anonymity is assured, 2. they have the choice and there is a 75% risk that the opponent finds out about the choice and 3. the participant is instructed to lie or tell the truth. A 3T Siemens fMRI scanner will be used for neuroimaging. First-level analyses will be done by using a general linear model with each condition as a regressor and trial number and reaction times as parametric modulators. At second-level analyses, a flexible factorial model will be used. Behaviourally, we expect more lying when anonymity is assured, slower response times for lie-decisions versus truth-decisions and we expect that over time lying becomes easier ('Slippery slope') in both spontaneous conditions. We expect activation, especially in the frontal regions. When reputation is at risk, we expect more activation in the ACC. Moreover, we expect that individuals who are more dishonest have decreased ACC activation and that over time ACC activation diminishes in all individuals.