The emotional economics of dishonesty

While a lot of research has investigated the cognitive mechanisms for lying, its associated affect is often overlooked. Here, we show that honesty and dishonesty cause short-lived, transient affect: honesty triggers relatively more positive affect than dishonesty. To investigate this, participants first performed several specific activities. After that, they answered questions regarding these (and other) activities in an affective priming paradigm. This required participants to first respond honestly or dishonestly to simple yes/no Prime questions, and afterwards to categorise positive or negative Probe words. Results show that participants were slower and more error prone when lying compared to responding honestly in the Prime task, replicating previous findings that it is cognitively more demanding to lie than to tell the truth. Most importantly, we found that telling the truth sensitises for subsequent positive stimuli, and it does more so than lying. Further, emotional habituation seems to take place, lessening the overall affective evaluation of self-produced actions over time. We discuss the functional role that affect may play in the generation and production of dishonesty-based behaviour in the framework of action control.