Cognitive Control Promotes Either Honesty or Dishonesty, Depending on One's Moral Default

Dishonesty causes enormous economic losses. To target dishonesty with interventions, a rigorous understanding of the underlying cognitive mechanisms is required. A recent study found that cognitive control enables honest participants to cheat, whereas it helps cheaters to be honest. However, it is evident that a single study does not suffice as support for a novel hypothesis. Therefore, we tested the replicability of this finding using a different modality (EEG instead of fMRI) together with an independent localizer task to avoid reverse inference. We find that the same neural signature evoked by cognitive control demands in the localizer task can be used to estimate (dis)honesty in an independent cheating task, establishing converging evidence that the effect of cognitive control indeed depends on a person's moral default.