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Can a Brain Scan Predict a Broken Promise?
from Scientific American
Last time you told someone "I'll call you," did you mean it? We all make promises in our daily interactions with others. On the one hand, promises such as "I'll return your book next week" or "I won't tell anyone" are not heavily binding, except maybe in a moral sense.
On the other hand, some of the promises we make bind us legally and financially. ... But imagine making a promise when in fact, you know you would benefit from not keeping it. Would you keep it anyway? Could we somehow tell in advance whether you're going to keep it or break it? And finally, could we predict your decision by looking at what happens in your brain?
All these questions are addressed in an exciting new study performed in Switzerland and led by Thomas Baumgartner and Urs Fischbacher. While their findings, published in Neuron, are brand new and thus need to be confirmed by further research, they suggest that it may indeed be possible to detect whether a person is about to break a promise based on brain activity, well before the promise is actually broken.
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