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Intrinsic honesty and the prevalence of rule violations across societies

2016; Nature Portfolio; Volume: 531; Issue: 7595 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1038/nature17160

1476-4687

Simon Gächter, Jonathan Schulz,

Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation

To test whether there is a relationship between the level of national corruption and the intrinsic honesty of individuals, a behavioural test of the honesty of people from 23 countries was conducted; the authors found that high national scores on an index of rule-breaking are linked with reduced personal honesty. Honesty is an important character trait in all human societies. Good institutions that limit cheating and rule violations are crucial for prosperity and development, yet deception is common in nature and humans are no exception. Using a behavioural test of honesty with young people (in 23 countries) in which lying is undetectable at the individual level but can be inferred at the population level, Simon Gächter and Jonathan Schulz find that high national scores on an index of rule-breaking are linked with reduced personal honesty. Deception is common in nature and humans are no exception1. Modern societies have created institutions to control cheating, but many situations remain where only intrinsic honesty keeps people from cheating and violating rules. Psychological2, sociological3 and economic theories4 suggest causal pathways to explain how the prevalence of rule violations in people’s social environment, such as corruption, tax evasion or political fraud, can compromise individual intrinsic honesty. Here we present cross-societal experiments from 23 countries around the world that demonstrate a robust link between the prevalence of rule violations and intrinsic honesty. We developed an index of the ‘prevalence of rule violations’ (PRV) based on country-level data from the year 2003 of corruption, tax evasion and fraudulent politics. We measured intrinsic honesty in an anonymous die-rolling experiment5. We conducted the experiments with 2,568 young participants (students) who, due to their young age in 2003, could not have influenced PRV in 2003. We find individual intrinsic honesty is stronger in the subject pools of low PRV countries than those of high PRV countries. The details of lying patterns support psychological theories of honesty6,7. The results are consistent with theories of the cultural co-evolution of institutions and values8, and show that weak institutions and cultural legacies9,10,11 that generate rule violations not only have direct adverse economic consequences, but might also impair individual intrinsic honesty that is crucial for the smooth functioning of society.