Tag Archives: lab experiments

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

Posted on by
1

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Guest Post: The Taxi Driver Paradox–or How Descriptive Social Norms Shape Corrupt Behavior

Posted on by
3

Nils Köbis, a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Experimental Economics and Political Decision-Making (CREED), University of Amsterdam, contributes today’s guest post:

Whenever I am traveling and take a taxi, I try to strike up a conversation with the driver. The beauty of this situation is that both sides can be really candid. The length is typically short, and chances are you will never meet again. The chat usually kicks off with some small talk about sports, weather, and food. Once warmed up, I have often asked: “What do you think is the biggest problem in your society?” So far, the most common answer has been corruption. And my taxi-driver-based anecdotal evidence is consistent with large  international surveys. Notwithstanding the old canard that people who live in corrupt societies generally tolerate corruption as normal and natural, ample empirical evidence (and my taxi drivers) suggests that this is not true: People widely despise corruption, especially in countries riddled with it. Yet on several occasions the very same taxi driver who has been ranting to me about corruption has stopped by a traffic police officer—and willingly paid a bribe to avoid a ticket.

What explains this apparent paradox? The most frequent explanation for why a person outraged by corruption would nevertheless pay a bribe is that “everybody does it”—as the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie nicely puts it, “If we do something over and over again it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over again it becomes normal.” This notion of normality plays an important role in explaining why corruption is sometimes the exception and sometimes the rule. Scholars who research social norms differentiate between injunctive norms, which concern whether a given behavior is acceptable, and descriptive norms, which indicate whether the same behavior is common. This distinction might help to explain the taxi-driver-paradox: People might often bribe because everybody else is doing it, even though they think it’s wrong. Continue reading →