Cognitive control promotes either honesty or dishonesty, depending on one’s moral default - EEG - JoN

However, the precise nature of this role has been hotly debated. Is honesty an intuitive response or is willpower needed to override an intuitive inclination to cheat?

A reconciliation of these conflicting views proposes that cognitive control enables dishonest participants to be honest, whereas it allows cheating for those who are generally honest. Thus, cognitive control does not promote (dis)honesty per se; it depends on one’s moral default. In the present study, we tested this proposal using EEG in humans (males & females) in combination with an external localizer task to mitigate the problem of reverse inference.