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The slippery slope of dishonesty

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Recent experiments suggest that dishonesty can escalate from small levels to ever-larger ones along a 'slippery slope'. Activity in bilateral amygdala tracks this gradual adaptation to repeated acts of self-serving dishonesty.

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Figure 1: Self-serving dishonesty leads to behavioral and neural adaptation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jan B. Engelmann is at the Center for Research in Experimental Economics and Political Decision Making (CREED), University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands,

    Jan B Engelmann

  2. the Tinbergen Institute, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.,

    Jan B Engelmann

  3. Ernst Fehr is in the Department of Economics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.,

    Ernst Fehr

Authors
  1. Jan B Engelmann
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  2. Ernst Fehr
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Correspondence to Jan B Engelmann or Ernst Fehr.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Engelmann, J., Fehr, E. The slippery slope of dishonesty. Nat Neurosci 19, 1543–1544 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4441

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