Birdnow's Aviary

April 03, 2026

The Neuro-Hypocrites

Timothy Birdnow

Liberals must surely have a serious breach in communications...

The neuroscience of hypocrisy points to a communication breakdown in the brain

Actually, while there may be some neural activity involved, I would argue hypocrisy is natural to Man and, frankly, unavoidable at times as there are often competing variables in life that require responses that often contradict one another.

For instance, you may not like, say, the Bush family (I despised them) but you might have voted for them anyway. Hypocrisy? Sure is but the alternative was worse. (I am so guilty.)

And frankly under such competing conditions one usually goes with the choice that best suits your own interests. It's human nature.

But of course this will set off the conscience of anyone so afflicted with one of those, and it will torment the individual. So the natural response is to dismiss the contradiction from our minds, pretend it isn't there.

That is the essence of Orwell's "double think"; hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time and ignore the contradiction. There really is no difference between that and standard hypocrisy.

The author of this article agrees:

"Most ethical choices involve a basic trade-off between personal gain and doing the right thing. When people make decisions for themselves, they face a direct temptation to secure a reward. When they watch someone else make a decision, they do not face that same temptation. This difference in perspective makes it easy to hold others to a higher standard."

Naturally so; it is the difference between objective and subjective, theory and practice. We hold certain standards but find our own standards a bit more lax than the standards we apply to others. We cut ourselves slack.

The article continues:

Valley Liu, a researcher at the University of Science and Technology of China, led a team of investigators to figure out why this disconnect happens. "As neuroscience researchers, we wanted to understand why knowing the right thing to do doesn’t always translate into doing it,” says coauthor Xiaochu Zhang of the University of Science and Technology of China. They suspected the answer lay in a brain area called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is located deep in the lower frontal lobe of the brain. It acts as an information hub during decision making. It helps individuals evaluate risks, weigh potential rewards, and process social rules.

That is to be expected; the frontal lobe is the center of higher reasoning and it is what moves us beyond mere instinct (which resides in the older part of the brain, the stem and limbic system). Hypocrisy is essentially a battle between higher and lower brain functions. Our frontal lobe reasoning competes with our base urges, desires, fears and wants. It is the struggle between the two that drives all of us, and in fact we could not survive without both of them. The endless tug-of-war between our instincts and base urges and our higher reasoning is what makes us human - and what makes us fallible. If we didn't have the primitive cortex we would be like angels - and about as alive as angels in this realm of existence. The hindbrain (brainstem and limbic syste) is what keeps us alive and fighting. The frontal region is what directs HOW we fight and HOW we stay alive.

(Of course without the frontal region we would simply be animals, driven by instinct and stupid as, well, Democrats.)

The article goes on to tell us how they concluded this:

To test their ideas, the research team designed two different tasks for a group of fifty-eight participants. In the first task, participants acted as instructors who had to help a learner identify a hidden number on a digital card. The instructors could choose to report the number honestly or lie to the learner.

The game was structured so that lying would earn the instructor more money. This created a direct conflict between financial gain and honest behavior. While making these choices, the participants lay inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. This machine uses strong magnetic fields to track blood flow in the brain, revealing which areas are active at any given moment.

In the second task, the same participants watched another person play the exact same card game. They were asked to rate the other person’s decisions on a scale ranging from extremely immoral to extremely moral. They completed this judgment task while also having their brain activity monitored in the scanner.

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The scientists used statistical models to calculate exactly how much each person valued profit compared to honesty. The results showed a distinct gap between the two tasks. When participants made their own choices, they were heavily influenced by the potential for financial profit. When they evaluated others, they based their judgments strictly on whether the observed person was honest.

Honesty is such a lonely word, as Billy Joel observed, and rightly so; everyone is so untrue. I know I am on occasion, despite my ambition to be completely honest. It's human nature, our fallen nature.

At any rate the researchers found:

The brain scans revealed physical differences between people who held consistent moral views and those who did not. The researchers looked at the specific patterns of brain activity rather than just the overall brightness of the brain scans. In morally consistent people, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex showed similar activity patterns during both the behavioral and the judgment tasks.

But the research didn't stop there:

Half of the participants received actual stimulation aimed at the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The other half received a fake version of the treatment, known as a sham stimulation. After the procedure, all participants completed the same card game and judgment exercises.

The people who received the real brain stimulation showed a wider gap between their behavior and their judgments. By disrupting the normal function of the brain region, the researchers successfully made people more hypocritical. This proved that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex directly controls moral consistency.

end

The $64,000 question is which came first, the frontal lobe or the egg? Is this lack of communication a function of brain architecture, perhaps genetic, or is it how the brain developed as a result of neuroplasticity, of being dishonest leading to a loss of a largely unused neural connection?

Brain architecture changes with use or lack thereof, and we call that neuroplasticity. In fact it's been proven that you can change the shape of your brain by an act of will (see the work of Jeffrey Shwartz with OCD patients and mindful meditation). If you choose to exercise that particular neural muscle and seek to be consistent in your thinking you will be more capable of being consistent. If you ignore your nagging conscience (which is what we are talking about here) that neural pathway will wither and you will be an amoral jackass.

The Bible put it best "as a man thinketh so shall he be".

Naturally, the conclusion the researchers reached was that it was not a matter of free will but a neurological problem. Neuroscience has been attacking free will for decades now and so has the rest of science and increasingly they seek to make all human behavior explainable not by choices made but by a hard-wired neural paradigm in which free will is an illusion - and thus we should have a technocracy where experts rule and the public is "treated" for bad behavior medically. It has never worked when it's been tried but they keep going back to it anyway.

It should come as no surprise the Chinese conducted this study; it comports perfectly with the authoritarian impulses of the Chinese Communist government.

As the article points out, the study was only involving money and involving Chinese people (Chinese culture has long put a high value on financial matters.)

I would like to try this on Christians v. non-Christians. I suspect the Christians would fare far better than did the Chinese test subjects here.

Another point to ponder; this is not a truly blind study insofar as the participants knew full well they were being tested for SOMETHING. And since they were getting paid why not fudge your thinking on it? It's not like it had real-world importance anyway. I wouldn't fudge on something if it hurt someone or took something away from someone else but they just might fudge a bit to get more money from researchers. No harm, no foul! What should have happened was the participants should have been told that if they got the money the other test subjects would be penalized. That would make all the difference in the world.

In the end this study doesn't tell us anything we basically already knew, and it certainly doesn't release anyone from any moral judgment that hypocrisy imposes. If you are a hypocrite you are a hypocrite. Just because your brain is numb to the fact does not change the underlying situation. Instead of using this to excuse bad behavior we should use this to promote strengthening our moral fiber through better moral education, through a more dynamic practice of religious moral teaching, and frankly through a greater judgmentalism, something that the modern Western World at least has eschewed in favor of relativism and "acceptance". That is what this study will be used to promote, I have no doubt, but it is the exact wrong takeaway from this.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:33 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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1 Very often one must choose the lesser of two evils. One of the Bushes, for example, or John McCain, or Mitt Romney. The list is long. Saying "staying home" is not an alternative, because that just means the other side would have been more apt to have won. Well, the other side DID win, it just means the other side would have shown a much bigger winning majority.

Posted by: Dana Mathewson at April 04, 2026 12:31 AM (HWHp2)

2 So true Dana.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at April 04, 2026 07:09 AM (oflqW)

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