The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

But that’s not all. You might wonder about the extra space that pathological liars must have in their skulls since they have so much less gray matter. Yang and her colleagues also found that pathological liars had 22 to 26 percent more white matter in the prefrontal cortex than non–pathological liars. With more white matter (remember, this is what links the gray matter), pathological liars are likely able to make more connections between different memories and ideas, and this increased connectivity and access to the world of associations stored in their gray matter might be the secret ingredient that makes them natural liars.

If we extrapolate these findings to the general population, we might say that higher brain connectivity could make it easier for any of us to lie and at the same time think of ourselves as honorable creatures. After all, more connected brains have more avenues to explore when it comes to interpreting and explaining dubious events—and perhaps this is a crucial element in the rationalization of our dishonest acts.

More Creativity Equals More Money

These findings made me wonder whether increased white matter could be linked to both increased lying and increased creativity. After all, people who have more connections among their different brain parts and more associations are presumably also more creative. To test this possible link between creativity and dishonesty, Francesca Gino and I carried out a series of studies. True to the nature of creativity itself, we approached the question from a variety of angles, starting with a relatively simple approach.

When our participants showed up at the lab, we informed them that they would answer some questions followed by a computerized task. The question set included many irrelevant questions about their general experiences and habits (these filler questions were designed to obscure the real intent of the study) and three types of questions that were the focus of the study.

In the first set of questions, we asked the participants to indicate to what degree they would describe themselves using some “creative” adjectives (insightful, inventive, original, resourceful, unconventional, and so on). In the second, we asked them to tell us how often they engage in seventy-seven different activities, some of which require more creativity and some less (bowling, skiing, skydiving, painting, writing, and so forth). In the third and last set of questions, we asked participants to rate how much they identified with statements such as “I have a lot of creative ideas,” “I prefer tasks that enable me to think creatively,” “I like to do things in an original way,” and other similar statements.

Once the participants completed the personality measures, we asked them to complete the dots task, which was presumably unconnected to the questions. In case you don’t recall this task, flip back to The “What- the- Hell” Effect in chapter 5, “Why Wearing Fakes Make Us Cheat More.”

What do you think happened? Would participants who chose a large number of creative adjectives, engaged in creative activities more frequently, and viewed themselves as more creative cheat more, less, or about the same as the participants who were not as creative?

We found that participants who clicked the more-on-right button (the one with the higher payout) more often tended to be the same people who scored higher on all three creativity measures. Moreover, the difference between more and less creative individuals was most pronounced in the cases where the difference in the number of dots on the right and left sides was relatively small.

This suggested that the difference between creative and less creative individuals comes into play mostly when there is ambiguity in the situation at hand and, with it, more room for justification. When there was an obvious difference between the number of dots on the two sides of the diagonal, the participants simply had to decide whether to lie or not. But when the trials were more ambiguous and it was harder to tell if there were more dots to the right or the left of the diagonal, creativity kicked into action—along with more cheating. The more creative the individuals, the better they were at explaining to themselves why there were more dots to the right of the diagonal (the side with the higher reward).

Put simply, the link between creativity and dishonesty seems related to the ability to tell ourselves stories about how we are doing the right thing, even when we are not. The more creative we are, the more we are able to come up with good stories that help us justify our selfish interests.

Does Intelligence Matter?