We have based our soci­ety on the assump­tion that decid­ing to lie or to tell the truth is within our con­scious con­trol. But […] this assump­tion may be flawed and […] hon­esty may instead be the result of con­trol­ling a desire to lie (a con­scious process) or of not feel­ing the temp­ta­tion to lie in the first place (an auto­matic process).

An intrigu­ing idea and one with far-reaching con­se­quences, espe­cially given that this is on what our entire judi­ciary sys­tem is based. Can some­one fairly be pun­ished for a genetic trait (innate lying)?

So is the desire to lie (or, con­versely, the desire to be hon­est) innate, and if so, what does this mean?

What they found is that hon­esty is an auto­matic process-but only for some peo­ple. Com­par­ing scans from tests with and with­out the oppor­tu­nity to cheat, the sci­en­tists found that for hon­est sub­jects, decid­ing to be hon­est took no extra brain activ­ity. But for oth­ers, the dis­hon­est group, both decid­ing to lie and decid­ing to tell the truth required extra activ­ity in the areas of the brain asso­ci­ated with crit­i­cal think­ing and self-control.

One sur­pris­ing find­ing from this study reveals the com­plex­ity [we] face in try­ing to dis­sect moral behav­ior: The deci­sion to lie for per­sonal gain turns out to be a strik­ingly unemo­tional choice. Some moral dilem­mas Greene stud­ies, like the trol­ley prob­lem, trig­ger emo­tional pro­cess­ing cen­ters in our brains. In his coin toss experiment, there was no sign at all that emo­tions fac­tored into a subject’s deci­sion to lie or to tell the truth. “Moral judg­ment is not a sin­gle thing,” Greene con­cludes, sug­gest­ing that although we often lump them together under the head­ing of “moral­ity,” decid­ing what’s right or wrong and decid­ing to tell the truth or to tell a lie may, in some situations, be entirely dis­con­nected processes.

On a related note: the clas­sic Good Samar­i­tan study.