The Social Brain by Jean Decety

Author:Jean Decety
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: social cognition; moral reasoning; language; theory of mind; deception; imitation; empathy; social categories; prosocial behavior; autism; psychopathy; developmental neuroscience
Publisher: MIT Press

Future Directions

We suggest several future directions of research to advance our current understanding of the development of lying and its cognitive and neural mechanisms.

The neural correlates underlying children’s emergence of lying.   Using microgenetic methods, we observed that young children discover how to tell self-benefiting lies spontaneously in the hide-and-seek game (Ding, Heyman, Fu, Zhu, & Lee, 2018a). Although we found that children with better EF and ToM discover how to lie more quickly, we know little about how children’s discovery of lying manifests itself at the neural level. Future studies can combine microgenetic and neuroimaging methods to observe more closely the process through which children discover how to lie. It would shed light on the relations between the cortical regions involve in ToM and EF and those involved in lying.

The neural correlates underlying adolescents’ lying behavior.   Previous studies mainly examined children and young adults’ deceptive behavior, with few studies focusing on adolescents. We noticed that there is an inverted U-shaped development of children’s lying: from three years onward, they begin to lie increasingly more often; however, children’s lies become increasingly less obvious as they reach school age (Evans & Lee, 2011). As revealed by adult studies, the reward system (motivation) may also play an important role in children’s deception behavior, especially during adolescence (Blakemore, 2008). It is possible that individuals recruit the cognitive control and reward systems differently when they are of different ages. For young children, they may need cognitive control to inhibit the truth in order to tell a lie whereas older children may need cognitive control for them to inhibit the reward system to tell the truth. It will be interesting to see how the reward system and cognitive control system contribute to adolescents’ deception compared with children and adults.

Short-term and long-term behavioral and neural effects of children’s deception.   Several behavioral training studies have shown that children’s deceptive behavior has short- and long-term effects on their cognitive development. Ding and her colleagues (2017) found that deception caused temporary changes in brain connectivities . It is not entirely clear whether lying leads to long-term changes in neural connectivities as well. Furthermore, recent behavioral studies have demonstrated the possibility that training children to deceive confers short-term cognitive benefits. It is unknown whether such training would have collateral neutral effects or whether such effects, if any exist, are beneficial or detrimental to brain development. It is possible that deception training leads to cognitive and neural short-term gains but not long-term efficiency. These intriguing possibilities await sustained research in the near future.

Verbal deception in social contexts.   Previous studies found that parenting factors affect children’s lying (Ma et al., 2015; Wang et al., 2017). At the same time, a few studies showed that parent–child brain-to-brain synchrony is an indicator of children’s social emotional development. Brain-to-brain synchrony may enable children to take another’s perspective and understand others’ actions (Nummenmaa et al., 2012). Future studies can establish a link between parent–child brain synchrony during parent–child interaction, ToM, and children’s lying behavior. We can also extend the existing deception paradigms and examine how children incorporate social norms and prosocial behavior into deception.

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