What could make you more honest?

Groucho Marx is credited to have said that honesty and fair dealing are the secrets of life and that if you can fake those, then you’ve got it made.

While faking honesty itself is another level of existence that probably our local politicians have uniquely perfected (and something to be even more wary about is that dishonesty has been found to be partially inheritable) and will require a whole new set of scientific tools to penetrate, science has recently found a way to make people more honest in what they have been told to do. You would be surprised at what the scientists used. It did not involve threats of court cases, social media humiliation or even threats of burning in hell.

In a recent study published in the Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences in the US, scientists asked their subjects to roll die and report how the roll turns out. The experiment was set up as such that they were told which outcomes would yield a monetary pay-off for the subjects. The subjects, standing to gain financially if they overstated the actual rewarding outcomes, did over report. In other words, they were dishonest, i.e., about 37% of the responses. Then the scientists did something with electricity, yes electricity.

The scientists have known that in experiments that demonstrated telling the truth, a part of the brain called the right dorsolateral pefrontal cortex (rDPLFC) gets activated. Luckily, a safe technique called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) which involves sending weak electrical currents through your scalp could be done to jog that part without having to cut you open. In fact, many experiments involving learning and mind wandering have been done using tDCS.

Applying tCDS to the same subjects who previously rolled die and reported the outcome, the same subjects lied 60 per cent lower than without tCDS.  On the up side, this gives us proof that gentle electricity could be our friend when it comes to coaxing more honest behavior from humans! But more seriously, this means that we could identify the network in our brain that is at work when we are struggling with honesty issues.

Before you start on any do-it-yourself project to make yourself and the people around you more honest, you should know that tCDS is a carefully calibrated scientific device that you should not make or try at home or by yourself or with friends who share your desire to make the world a better place with more honest people. In fact, even beyond the discovery that electricity could affect your morality, the researchers who did this also discovered a few other fascinating things about how we arrive at an honest or dishonest behavior.

The researchers of course wondered how tCDS made people more honest. They figured maybe it had to do with tCDS making more people less greedy. To test this. They used a proven “dictator game” which has been known to show that people who behave selfishly in these games, cheat more. They applied tCDS to the participants but they found no change in the rate they have cheated versus if they did not have tCDS applied to them. So the scientists think that it is not because people become less greedy which makes them make honest decisions. So could they have become more honest because they placed more value in “honesty” as a moral virtue?

Well, they tested that too. They asked the participants how revolting they thought “misreporting of the die outcomes” was.  It turned out that with or without tCDS, there was no significant change in how people valued honesty.  They even tested if tCDS affected how people thought of dishonesty in all sorts of everyday situations and tCDS did not have a significant effect. People thought what they believed in at the level they did, regardless of tCDS. So what made people more honest?

It is only those who are conflicted enough to weigh the two were made more honest by tCDS. The key is the tug-o-war between what you think you will gain and how you feel about honesty as a virtue. The inner fight has to exist. You have to have a conflict in the first place. Just thinking about what to gain alone or thinking how honest you should be alone will not likely help you arrive at honest decisions.

Another very important finding is that when you lie so that others, and NOT you, will benefit from it, tCDS does not make you more honest. This proves that the brain parts affected by tCDS is specific only to your self-interest and how honest you think you should be. It does NOT apply in other situations which calls for your honesty.

This column is not about the wonders of weak electrical currents on your scalp. Humans make honest decisions everyday, having to struggle with inner conflicts, without having to “electrify” themselves honest literally in the head. This shows that the inner conflict is naturally present in humans. We just probably have to find the behavioral or thought equivalent of tCDS – that “protuberance” to swing us to honesty.  

What extra thing should we cultivate to be more honest in our habits? What other considerations should we think about when weighing self-interest against how honest we want to be? To cheat or not to cheat, that is the big question. – Rappler.com