GAB is delighted to welcome Nils Köbis, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, to contribute today’s guest post:

Suppose that you need some sort of official license, such as a fishing permit. Would you consider obtaining that license—or obtaining it more quickly—by paying a bribe? Now suppose that you are traveling in a foreign country and you need a similar sort of license. Would you consider paying a bribe to get that license in that foreign setting—if we assume that the probability of getting caught and the possible penalties are the same as in your home country, but that bribery is much more common by citizens of that country?

Are your answers to the two questions the same? Do you think other people’s answers to those questions—or, more importantly, their actual behavior—will be the same or different, depending on whether they are at home or abroad?

This question implicates a more general issue in moral and behavioral psychology. Some believe that the moral constraints on our behavior are relatively stable: In the example above, some people believe paying bribes is wrong and won’t do it, no matter where they are, while others are willing to pay bribes, at least if they the advantage of doing so is big enough and they think they will probably be able to get away with it—again, without reference to other aspects of the surrounding context. But some research has suggested that the (perceived) behavior of others can exert a strong pull on our moral compass (see, for example, here, here, and here).

To further explore this question, my collaborators and I conducted a study that involved online experiments with 6,472 participants from 18 nations, in which the participants played a bribery game based on the our opening example. Our findings were both surprising and intriguing, and suggest that our inclination to engage in corrupt behavior is influenced by our stereotypes (not always accurate) of people from diifferent countries. Continue reading →