Tag Archives: behavioral psychology

Does Corruption Flourish in a “Culture of Corruption”?

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A common intuition about corruption is that individuals are more likely to engage in corruption when they witness others committing corrupt acts without facing serious consequences—in other words, a “culture of corruption” can be self-perpetuating (see here and here), and the perception or belief that corruption is widespread can itself be a cause of corruption. While compelling, this intuition has not been subjected to much empirical scrutiny. While there does seem to be some evidence of an association between individuals’ perceptions of the prevalence of domestic corruption and those individuals’ inclination to act corruptly, the research on this topic is relatively thin.

In a recent paper, a group of academics (Israel Waismel-Manor, Patricia Moy, Rico Neumann, and Moran Shechnick) weighed in, presenting the results of a controlled lab experiment that sought to assess whether news about corruption by public officials affected individuals’ incentives to behave dishonestly. The study was conducted in Israel, and participants were required first to watch a short television news segment. The treatment group’s segment revolved around an Israeli mayor suspected of certain corrupt acts, while the control group’s segment was unrelated to corruption. The participants were also given a short quiz about the segment they’d seen, and half of the participants in each group were offered a monetary reward if they answered all the questions correctly; they were told “to answer all questions from memory” and not look anything up on the internet. However, unbeknownst to the participants, one of the questions could not be answered without doing additional searches, so the researchers could use the answer to this question to identify those participants who cheated on the test. The real goal of the study (of which participants were not aware) was to see whether exposure to the corruption news story (alone or in combination with the financial incentive) affected participants’ likelihood of cheating.

Unsurprisingly, participants who were offered money for answering all questions correctly cheated far more often, regardless of which news story they watched. The study’s authors seem to have expected that those participants who watched the corruption-related story would also cheat more (holding constant whether they had financial incentives to answer questions correctly). But this did not occur: Participants who watched the news segment involving a mayor suspected of corruption did not cheat in statistically significantly higher rates than those who watched the other, unrelated-to-corruption segment. The researchers suggested that perhaps the reason was that Israelis had been inundated with so much news about official corruption around the time of the experiment (which took place in 2019), particularly in connection with the investigation and prosecution of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior politicians (see here, here, and here), that the marginal impact of exposure to additional news about corruption, in the form of this one story, would not have much impact.

While that explanation is plausible, I have some other concerns about the research’s design and methodology, which make me question whether this experiment was in fact a good way to assess the “culture of corruption” hypothesis.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Behavioral Psychology, Transnational Bribery, and “Conditional Corruption”

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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 →

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Shaul Shalvi

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this episode, Nils Köbis interviews Professor Shaul Shalvi, of the University of Amsterdam’s Center for Research in Experimental Economics and Political Decision-Making (CREED), about how experimental research in behavioral psychology can help us understand corruption, and unethical behavior more generally. In addition to covering some of the main experimental results on ethical behavior (some of which can be found here), Professor Shalvi also discusses how and when children develop the ability to cheat, and the shift in research on ethical decision-making from an individual perspective (studying people who make ethical decisions by themselves) to a more social perspective (studying contexts in which people make ethical decisions together). This latter perspective considers questions like how unethical behavior by some can encourage others to break ethical rules as well, and how the perception of the identity of the victim (an abstraction, like “society,” versus a concrete person or people) can affect people’s willingness to break ethical rules.

You can find this episode, along with links to previous podcast episodes, at the following locations:

KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.