What science reveals about our tendency toward corruption

A year-long experiment was conducted at the self-service checkouts of a supermarket chain in Modena and Ferrara in Italy to test whether there was any link between corruption scandals and how honest consumers were with their shopping. Analyzing data from random checks on the supermarket carts, the researchers found that the probability of not declaring all the purchases increased by 16% to 30% after a local corruption scandal made headlines. The effect reached its peak four days after the news broke, then tailed off. It was defined as contagious corruption.

According to academics, corruption is the abuse of power for private gain, but it can take many forms: bribery, embezzlement, extortion and fraud. It began to be studied in the 1990s by economists using the theory of rational choice and the so-called rational crime model. The prestigious researcher Robert Klitgaard summarized it by saying that corruption is not a crime of passion, but a crime of calculation. And people who choose to be corrupt are making very explicit calculations — namely, how much profit they can make, how likely they are to get caught and the consequences if they are.

In the last decade, behavioral economics and social psychology methods have been adopted to test and measure this paradigm in conjunction with behavioral data. If I increase punishment, does corruption decrease? If I increase benefits, does it increase? “What we find are contradictory results: sometimes yes, sometimes no,” says Nils Kobis, Professor of Human Understanding of Algorithms and Machines at the University Duisburg-Essen and affiliated researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.

Kobis, founder of KickBack-The Global Anticorruption Podcast, has created game versions of corruption and bribery primarily to establish the psychology behind the phenomena. Is it a form of corruption that I do for myself like embezzlement, i.e., stealing while in a position of power, or is it an interpersonal one like bribery where we have to coordinate to break a rule together? Kobis explains that these acts are completely different.

One of the studies, published in the journal PNAS, involved a large bribery experiment in which the researchers got people from 18 countries to pair up and analyze whether their own country of origin weighed more heavily in their decision to offer or accept bribes than that of the person they were paired with. The results were surprising.

“In the literature on corruption, there is this idea that some countries are corrupt and some are not and if, for example, someone from New Zealand, which is often considered one of the most corruption-free societies, travels to a country with a lot of corruption — for example, Somalia, which is often at the bottom of the rankings — a New Zealander would be immune to corruption and never engage in it. And vice versa, if someone from Somalia came to New Zealand, they would constantly try to break rules,” says Kobis. But what they discovered is that the nationality of the other player was more important than their own and all — New Zealanders, Dutch and British — were willing to offer bribes to those they believed to be corrupt in what they defined as conditional bribery.

If there were some sort of corrupt personality, Kobis explains, then corruption would be more predictable. A corrupt person would be corrupt all the time, and a person of integrity would not get involved, regardless of who they mixed with. “What we saw is that people acted based on who they were paired with. So, it seems to be much more dynamic and flexible and not so much a matter of a stable, incorruptible personality,” he adds. The bad news is that even those who consider themselves immune to corruption can easily become corrupt, but the good news is that it has much more to do with the environment than the person.

“If you put people in the right environment, with the right institutions, you can reduce corruption substantially, possibly because they quickly adapt to what’s going on in their environment,” Kobis explains. To study the effect of belief systems, Kobis and his team conducted a field study in Manguzi, South Africa, a small town where they had evidence that corruption was decreasing. They put up posters informing the population what they were working on and set up a small mobile laboratory for people to play these games. What they found was that, as long as the posters were up, the willingness of the locals to participate in bribery decreased.

On the upside, if people start to believe that there is less corruption, they adapt to that scenario and are less tempted to engage in it. “Once we took down the posters, the corruption went back to its original level, so it didn’t last long, but for a short period of time we changed their beliefs and their behavior,” says Kobis.

Besides what we believe is going on around us, there are a whole series of psychological attitudes to be taken into account, such as do you object strongly to corruption or are you more or less flexible. “The problem is that many forms of corruption are relatively easy to rationalize because not only am I benefiting myself, but often I am also benefiting someone else and we tend to neglect the fact that there is a victim,” Kobis explains. “We can’t ignore the fact that it’s actually a win-win-lose situation. There is always another party involved.”

From a psychological perspective, the problem is this third party is often very abstract, like society. “You think, well, who am I hurting? And there is no feeling of guilt. So, emotions are another factor that affect our decisions. If I feel guilty fast, I’m less likely to engage in corrupt activities. So it’s not always a calculative crime. Sometimes passion really matters in both directions: emotions can drive us to refrain from corruption, but can also drive it,” he concludes. Nepotism is a case in point, with very complex reciprocity networks, where family members or friends install others in jobs, and affection and obligation compromises integrity.

According to Fernando Jiménez, professor at the University of Murcia where he co-directs the Chair of Good Governance and Public Integrity, in order to explain corruption, you need to factor in the institutional aspect.

“The key to corruption is improving the quality of government. Without that, anti-corruption strategies are bound to fail,” he says. For Jiménez, when someone in power is subject to effective boundaries, not only does it allow for better control of corruption, but it also “ensures better levels of prosperity, more equal opportunities, and also higher levels of institutional and social trust.”

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