Sex, Lies and fMRI-Gender Differences in Neural Basis of Deception

Deception has always been a part of human communication as it helps to promote self-presentation. Although both men and women are equally prone to try to manage their appearance, their strategies, motivation and eagerness may be different. Here, we asked if lying could be influenced by gender on both the behavioral and neural levels. To test whether the hypothesized gender differences in brain activity related to deceptive responses were caused by differential socialization in men and women, we administrated the Gender Identify Inventory probing the participants' subjective social sex role. In an fMRI session, personal information. Only for personal information, we found differences in neural responses during instructed deception in men and women. The women vs. men direct contrast revealed no significant differences in areas of activation, but men showed higher BOLD signal compared to women in the left middle front gyrus (MFG). Moreover, this effect remained unchanged when self-reported psycholoigical gender was controlled for. Thus, ourstudy showed that gender differences in the neural processes engaged during falsifying personal information might be independent from socialization.