In honest participants in Greene and Paxton's study, brain activity in the control network (including the anterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex) showed no significant difference between losses from an honest choice and unavoidable losses.
Notes on verification
Confirmed by the original Greene & Paxton (2009) PNAS study and independently replicated by Abe & Greene (2014) in Journal of Neuroscience. The specific grouping of ACC, DLPFC, and vmPFC as 'control network' is consistent with broader literature terminology, though not verbatim quoted in a single source. [tier=gold indep_score=0.988 clusters=4 claim_tier=notable] [kind-backfill 2026-09-15: kind=attributed eligibility=high]
Sources
- Will vs. Grace – are people honest because they resist temptation or ... (seed:science_and_space)
- https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0900152106 (corroboration)
- https://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/32/10564 (corroboration)
- https://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/node/1213 (corroboration)
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6802594 (corroboration)