Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Corruption Roots (At the roots of corruption: a behavioral ethics approach)
Teaser
For many years, human cooperation has been praised as beneficial in organizational and personal settings. Indeed, cooperation allows people to develop trust, build meaningful relationships, achieve mutually beneficial outcomes, and strengthen bonding with one\'s group members...
Summary
For many years, human cooperation has been praised as beneficial in organizational and personal settings. Indeed, cooperation allows people to develop trust, build meaningful relationships, achieve mutually beneficial outcomes, and strengthen bonding with one\'s group members. However, while the benefits of cooperation are clear, very little is known about its possible negative aspects. Such negative aspects include the potential emergence of unethical conduct among cooperating partners, or as termed here – corrupt collaboration. Such joint unethical efforts, benefiting (directly or indirectly) one or more of the involved parties, occur in business, sports, and even academia. Corrupt collaboration emerges when one party bends ethical rules (here: lie) to set the stage for another party to further bend ethical rules and get the job done, that is, secure personal profit based on joint unethical acts. We propose that corrupt collaborations most commonly occur when all involved parties gain from the corrupt behavior. The current proposal is aimed at unfolding the roots and nature of corrupt collaborations; their existence, the psychological and biological processes underlying them, and the settings most likely to make corrupt collaboration emerge and spread. Accordingly, the information gathered in the current proposal has the potential to change the commonly held conceptions regarding the unidimensional – positive – nature of cooperation. It will help create a comprehensive understanding of cooperation and, specifically, when it should be encouraged or, alternatively, monitored.
Objectives: The overarching aim of the proposed research is to unravel how corrupt collaboration evolves, spreads, and can be kept in check. Specifically, and building on the work described above, the current work seeks to: (1) identify which incentive structures (e.g., the relative profit gained by each of the cooperating parties) increase corrupt collaborations, (2) assess how corrupt collaboration may spread to unrelated people, (3) reveal how corrupt groups form when people select their interaction partners, (4) investigate how installing punishment and reward systems may decrease corrupt collaborations when enforced by external observers (e.g., auditors) but may paradoxically also increase it when enforced by one of the benefiting parties, and finally (5) determine the extent to which corrupt collaboration has biological roots in the oxytocinergic system.
Work performed
The main results obtained so far tackle large parts of the objectives recognized in the outset of the project. In a paper summarizing the data used as a pilot to the project, we found that evidence for the collaborative roots of corruption (Weisel & Shalvi, 2015, PNAS). Specifically, cooperation is essential for completing tasks that individuals cannot accomplish alone. Whereas the benefits of cooperation are clear, little is known about its possible negative aspects. Introducing a novel sequential dyadic die-rolling paradigm, we show that collaborative settings provide fertile ground for the emergence of corruption. In the main experimental treatment the outcomes of the two players are perfectly aligned. Player A privately rolls a die, reports the result to player B, who then privately rolls and reports the result as well. Both players are paid the value of the reports if, and only if, they are identical (e.g., if both report 6, each earns €6). Because rolls are truly private, players can inflate their profit by misreporting the actual outcomes. Indeed, the proportion of reported doubles was 489% higher than the expected proportion assuming honesty, 48% higher than when individuals rolled and reported alone, and 96% higher than when lies only benefited the other player. Breaking the alignment in payoffs between player A and player B reduced the extent of brazen lying. Despite player B\'s central role in determining whether a double was reported, modifying the incentive structure of either player A or player B had nearly identical effects on the frequency of reported doubles. Our results highlight the role of collaboration—particularly on equal terms—in shaping corruption. These findings fit a functional perspective on morality. When facing opposing moral sentiments—to be honest vs. to join forces in collaboration—people often opt for engaging in corrupt collaboration.
More recent findings from our lab revealed that when people experience generosity from another person, they are more likely to bend ethical rules to favor this person in return. This findings is telling when considering how corrupt relations form (Leib, Shalvi, & Moran, working paper). We further used a meta-analytic approach to study people’s intuitive tendency to be honest, or alternatively lie, and find evidence that intuitive lies are common when the entity suffering from the dishonesty is unclear, but intuitive honesty is common when another person is to suffer from one’s lies (Kobis et al., a working paper). We (Gross, Leib, Offerman, & Shalvi, working paper) recently assessed how corrupt groups form. Specifically, we assessed participants likelihood to engage in corrupt collaboration as a function of being able (or not) to choose their interaction partner. This is similar to work-place settings in which employees can choose (or not) whether to be part of a job rotate program. Our results reveal the moral hazards associated with providing people the freedom to choose their partners, as not only dishonest people seek a dishonest partner, many honest people act very similarly.
Finally, in a recent publication (Soraperra et al., 2017 Economics Letters) we suggested that people are rather dishonest when working on collaborative tasks. We experimentally study whether this is driven by the collaborative situation or by mere exposure to dishonest norms. In the collaborative treatment, two participants in a pair receive a payoff (equal to the reported outcome) only if both report the same die-roll outcome. In the norm exposure treatment, participants receive the same information regarding their partner’s action as in the collaborative treatment, but receive payoffs based only on their own reports. We find that average dishonesty is similarly high with and without collaboration, but the frequency of dyads in which both players are honest is lower in collaboration than in the norm exposure setting.
Final results
Our team is busy with developing and testing additional theoretical questions related to addressing the objectives defined in the proposal. We anticipate to advance the state of the art in multiple ways, especially in terms of further addressing the development of corrupt groups and our understanding of the moral costs associated with engaging in such behaviors.
Website & more info
More info: https://sites.google.com/site/morallabshalvi/.