Bribery is more common in some countries and cultures than others. This much we have known for a long time. But the question of why this is true has not been an easy one to answer.
Flickr photo by Sarah
Some have proposed poverty as a factor, for example, and it may be. After all, when police are poorly paid they might have more incentive to take a bribe. But then we can point to poor places where bribery is not as common. What other factors are there? Mental ones. In fact, recent research looks at the psychology of bribery. As reported on ScienceDaily.com; http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111005131717.htm
“Part of the answer seems to be the level of collective feeling in a society, according to research by Pankaj Aggarwal, University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) professor of marketing in the Department of Management, and Nina Mazar, University of Toronto professor of marketing.
Aggarwal and Mazar discovered that people in more collectivist cultures — in which individuals see themselves as interdependent and as part of a larger society — are more likely to offer bribes than people from more individualistic cultures. Their work suggests that people in collectivist societies may feel less individually responsible for their actions, and therefore less guilty about offering a bribe.
In their paper to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, the researchers used data from a group called Transparency International, which rated the tendency of business people from 22 different countries to offer bribes to foreign business partners. They compared this with scores from another existing study that rated how collectivist each of those countries was. And finally they adjusted for the wealth of each country.
Adjusted for wealth, the degree of collectivism in a country predicted just how likely a business person was to offer a bribe to a business partner.”
Interestingly, it was not found that people in bribery-prone cultures felt differently about the practice. It seems that it is morally repugnant everywhere. It seems to be a matter of context, which includes the cultural ideas around people. In other experiments done with university students, those who had been “primed” with collectivist ideas were more likely to say they would pay a bribe when presented with a hypothetical scenario. Again, all the participants thought that bribery was wrong, but the willingness to engage in it was still there, and more so when the students first were presented with collectivist ideas to think about.
The psychology of bribery revealed in these studies suggests that context is more important than what we normally call “moral character.” This has wider application, of course. We like to think people are good and bad at some deeper level (and there may be some truth to this), yet as discomforting as it is to those who prefer to see things in terms of easy moral judgments, we discover again and again that context makes more of a difference in decision making than one’s stated beliefs or previously measured character traits.
Comments