The High Cost of Lying to Ourselves

There’s no shortage of opinions that defy common sense and millennia of civilizational orthodoxy. Millions of Americans today believe a person should be absolved of admittedly murdering her children, that men can be women, and that punctuality is a form of white supremacy, among other perspectives. It’s natural to ask how anyone could possibly believe such things. 

When we tell a lie, to ourselves or others, the brain has measurable responses, and advances in neurological research are revealing them. Dr. Sydney Ceruto, who holds a doctorate in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, has explored the science of lying and what it does to the brain. Her August analysis, Why Your Brain Makes You Lie: The Neuroscience of Deception, unpacks the complexities of what the brain does when we lie and how lying can affect our actions. 

For starters, the brain has to work harder when we lie. Lying prompts the prefrontal cortex to suppress honesty, build the false narrative, monitor internal consistency surrounding the lie, and predict how others might react. According to Ceruto, lying demands the brain engage in “four parallel computations where truth-telling requires one.” That’s why the details of the truth are easier to remember than the details of a lie. 

Then there’s the amygdala, which plays a part in calculating the risk of lying and can trigger physiological responses like an elevated heart rate and other stressors. It’s akin to the brain’s safety alarm, warning us that lying carries social dangers. But after prolonged lying, the amygdala’s signals are diminished. This creates what Ceruto calls “a neurochemical escalation pathway where lies grow larger because the internal warning system has been progressively dampened.” It’s how little lies become big lies. 

If you’ve ever felt bad or physically uncomfortable after telling a lie, that’s attributable to the insula. It’s the part of the brain that monitors physiological responses to lying. For people who habitually lie, the insula becomes less sensitive, and Ceruto explains that the brain “in neurological terms, learned to stop listening to their own body’s warning system,” so over time, people grow more comfortable with the lies they tell themselves. But it can get worse. When someone achieves a lie’s objective, the brain releases dopamine, a chemical that provides, among other things, feelings of pleasure and satisfaction. Dopamine becomes a reward for lying. 

These neurological shifts can eventually change how we see ourselves. Ceruto reports “brains have learned to prioritize social acceptance over truthful self-expression, constructing elaborate deceptive personas that eventually feel more real than their authentic selves.” This explains how cultural pressures can sway people to believe the same lies as those around them. 

The result is what Ceruto calls a quantifiable neural cost that can lead to “progressive difficulty distinguishing between what they genuinely believe and what they have performed believing.” It’s how lying can change a person’s perception once they convince themselves of something they innately know is false. This neurological response to any moral conflict associated with the lie can trigger what Ceruto describes as a “rumination cycle,” which can lead to mental disorders related to the sadness and depression that sprout from dwelling on regrets, past failures and so forth. 

This might account for why some people are unable or unwilling to talk about beliefs based on lies. Ceruto says “every durable self-deception is load bearing: it is holding up something the person cannot yet afford to feel,” and explains why “direct challenge so reliably produces defensiveness rather than change.” According to Ceruto, this response can be so pronounced that “information that contradicts a cherished self-narrative is functionally identical to the neural threat response to a physical attack.” When someone claims that words are violence, this could explain why.

Recall how fans at a Portland, Oregon sporting event were recently kicked out for wearing XX-XY T-shirts. Several believers of transgender ideology were apparently unable to observe a truth that challenged the lies they told themselves. Rather than discuss or simply ignore this challenge, they became defensive and made censorious demands, reflecting the neurological response to lies they told themselves, as described by Ceruto. 

When desperate people hunger for social acceptance, they can and do lie to themselves in order to achieve it. What role might neurology have played in the minds of the 11 jurors in the Lindsay Clancy trial who were prepared to excuse her confessed triple homicide? We’ll never know, but there’s ample correlation with Ceruto’s thesis. 

These behaviors are clearly harmful to individuals, but the harm multiplies when it metastasizes to a broader population. In a sense, people become alethophobic — the fear or dislike of truth — and the best way to manage any phobia is to confront one’s fears. It’s a heavy lift for someone to overcome the neurological barriers created by lying to oneself and muster the courage to confront those fears. But it’s a good place to start for improving mental hygiene and strengthening the fabric of society. 

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