A study examines when and why bribes buy influence, and which decreases their effectiveness

A new study from Carnegie Mellon University suggests that greed, not willingness to reciprocate, is the main reason why people give in to corruption. But research has also revealed that sometimes the all-powerful money can be ignored and that the effects of a bribe can be mitigated.

The study indicates that when incentives depend on choice, people accept and reward bribes. On the other hand, when bribes are not subordinated to obtaining a given result, they do not distort the judgment so much.

In the Carnegie Mellon experiment, pairs of participants wrote original jokes and submitted them to a judge, who was responsible for deciding what pun was funniest. The joke racers could blindly submit bribes up to $ 5.

When the judges were allowed to keep only one bribe, nearly 90% of them chose the joke with the most money. The best joke (determined by independent evaluators) was chosen in 60% of cases.

"Quality was fundamentally ignored when the person could pocket the winner's bribe," said Silvia Saccardo, badistant professor of social sciences and decision-making at Carnegie Mellon, who led the study. "Almost all people went with the money."

The results were different when the judges could keep the two bribes. They selected the best joke 84% of the time. In fact, they overwhelmingly chose the person who wrote the funniest joke, even when they offered the lower bribe.

"When the salary of the referees did not depend on the choice of the winner, the corruption did not distort the judgment," said Saccardo, a faculty member of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences Dietrich of the CMU. "And because they opted for quality instead of a higher yield, this indicates that in our data, reciprocity of data is not a determinant of corruption. "

The researchers, who also include scientists Uri Gneezy from the University of California at San Diego and Roel van Veldhuizen from the WZB Social Science Center in Berlin, have created a final scenario in the study that gave the opportunity to overcome greed.

Rather than allowing participants to bribe the judge when they submitted their jokes, the joke storytellers had to wait two minutes. This additional time allowed judges to read and objectively evaluate submitted documents before receiving money. They could only keep the winner's money; They chose the best joke 81% of the time.

"When a bribe arrives before you have time to make an unbiased decision, you" convince yourself "to convince yourself that a mediocre proposition is actually the best one," Saccardo said. more difficult to justify your own dishonesty once you have already made a decision before receiving a bribe. "

The researchers reproduced the main conditions of study in an Indian market with the help of a taste test. The results were consistent.

The World Bank estimates that nearly $ 1 billion worth of bribes are traded each year. By deepening their knowledge of the effects of corruption on our behavior and moral judgment, researchers hope to find ways to minimize its effects.

"Our results suggest that policy interventions that focus on increasing the moral costs of distortion and limit the possibility of selfish bias could be an effective way to reduce the effectiveness of bribery", said Saccardo. "An example is to ask evaluators to follow objective evaluation criteria."

Explore further:
Corruption hits 1.6 billion people a year

More information:
Uri Gneezy et al, Corruption: Behavioral Factors of Distorted Decisions, Journal of the European Economic Association (2018). DOI: 10.1093 / jeea / jvy043