Deception involves cognition, especially executive functioning that istraditionally associated withthe prefrontal cortex (PFC-based), and itinvolves emotion such as risk, fear, and guilt traditionally associatedwith the limbic system. However, it remains unknown how emotions influence deception, specifically whether positive and negative emotions have anunequal influence on the decision to deceive someone. Employing a two-person deception task (N=290) where deception reflects increasingself-gain while decreasing other’s gain, I compare decision to deceive theother person for seeking gain versus those made to avoiding a loss (i.e., gain-loss asymmetry). As expected, result suggest that loss has anoverwhelming effect on deception. Counter to the common belief thatdeception is driven by greed and gain, in line with other decision makingtasks, the result imply that deceptionin a two-person choice task is triggered by loss-aversion.

Dr. Varsha Singh is Assistant Professor at Humanities and Social Science atIIT Delhi and teaches Psychology. She has taught Organizational Behavior atthe IIM-Kozhikode and at IISc-Bangalore. Her research interest lies inunderstanding theoretical dualities and coupled-systems such as mind-cognition, brain-behavior, and affective polarity. She aims to applytheory to understand real-world problems such as sex-difference in salarydifferential, and in STEM field, embodied nature of learning and higher education.