People have a greater satisfaction when they receive a reward for telling the truth rather than for a lie, according to an international team of researchers. The findings are based on two Chinese studies that were conducted using a new neuroimaging method called near-infrared spectroscopy.
"This is a relatively new imaging technique which uses laser lights to shoot through the scalp," said Professor Kang Lee of University of Toronto, CTV News reports.
These studies are the first to determine whether lying makes people feel good or bad.
"Our findings together show that people typically find truth-telling to be more rewarding than lying in different types of deceptive situations," Lee said in a statement.
For the studies, the researchers focused two different types of deception. In the first study, the recipient was unaware that the deceiver is lying. In the second study, the deceivers consciously lied knowing that the recipient knew their intent, such as bluffing in poker.
The researchers found that a liar's cortical reward system was more active in acts of truth telling than lying. They also observed greater brain activations in the frontal lobe while telling a lie than truth. This indicates that lying takes up more neural resources than telling the truth.
These findings suggest that the brain has an "intrinsic positive value for truth-telling," said Lee.
The team comprised of researchers from Zhejiang Normal University, China; East China Normal University, China; Beijing Jiaotong University, China; and the University of Toronto.
The finding has been recently published in the neuroscience journals Neuropsychologia and NeuroImage.
Previous studies showed that humans find it hard to detect when people are lying. Even though there are less chances of getting caught, majority of the adults lie rarely.
"(We don't lie often) because lying costs more in terms of our resources and is not as intrinsically rewarding as truth telling," Lee told CTV News.
