HONEST people don’t have to work at not cheating. They’re not even tempted.
When studying honesty, neuroscientists usually ask people to either tell the truth or lie while undergoing a brain scan. This is unsatisfactory, because even the “liars” are doing as they are told, so Joshua Greene and Joseph Paxton at Harvard University came up with an alternative.
They asked volunteers to bet money on the flip of a coin. Sometimes the players had to record their predictions before the flip, and sometimes they said whether they had guessed correctly after the flip, giving them the opportunity to cheat.…
