Being honest when tempted to cheat elicits activation in reward-related brain regions and protects mood

Scientific discourse often posits that being honest in tempting situations, where cheating would go unnoticed, is inherently costly. Because honesty often requires sacrificing extrinsic rewards and enduring the aversive costs of recruiting self-control, it appears unlikely that honesty holds an inherent value for the individual. In this research, we challenge this assumption by demonstrating that honesty can be intrinsically rewarding, offsetting the inherent costs of control (Study 1) and mitigating the negative emotional impact of foregoing extrinsic rewards (Study 2). We compared conditions in which no external reward was obtained, but critically, in one condition participants could have cheated to receive a reward. Choosing honesty (thus forgoing the reward), compared to receiving no reward when cheating was impossible, was associated with increased activity in reward-related brain regions, consistent with honesty having an intrinsic value (Study 1, n = 65). To address possible concerns regarding reverse inference in the fMRI data, we obtained converging behavioral evidence in a follow-up online study ( n = 2,005), which showed that being honest attenuated negative effects of not receiving rewards on participants’ mood. These findings suggest that beyond the moral imperative, honesty carries an immediate intrinsic benefit that can promote honest behavior.