Once a cheater, always a cheater - or so the saying goes. But is it true?
Well, according to a new study, yes.
The research carried out by UCL suggests why serial cheaters constantly lie to their partners and commit adultery.
According to the study, it’s because with every lie a person tells, they feel less bad about doing so afterwards.
“We speculate that the blunted response to repetitive acts of dishonesty may reflect a reduction in the emotional response to these decisions or to their emotional assessment and saliency,” the report says.
The reason this happens is due to a region in the brain called the amygdala, which delivers a negative response when we lie.
However, each time we do so, the response provided by the amygdala declines, thus we feel less remorseful about lying.
The study was devised to test people’s capacity to lie. Participants were shown pictures of clear jars of coins and asked to help someone else, who was only shown a blurred image, guess how many coins the jar contained.
When they were told they’d receive money if their partner overestimated the number of coins in the jar, people were more likely to lie.
The study may not have focused on cheating in specific, but the authors believe a comparable mechanism could apply.
“The idea would be the first time we commit infidelity we feel bad about it. But the next time we feel less bad and so on, with the result that we can commit adultery to a greater extent,” Neil Garrett, a co-author of the paper and researcher at Princeton Neuroscience Institute told Elite Daily.
This means that the more we lie, the more likely we are to lie again. And in this way, little white lies easily become big lies.