National Corruption Breeds Personal Dishonesty
A shady government influences the moral behavior of its citizens
By Simon Makin on March 1, 2017
One bad apple spoils the barrel, so the saying goes. But what if the barrel itself is rotten?
A number of studies have shown that seeing a peer behave unethically increases people's dishonesty in laboratory tests. What is much harder to investigate is how this kind of influence operates at a societal level. But that is exactly what behavioral economists Simon Gächter of the University of Nottingham in England and Jonathan Schulz of Yale University set out to do in a study published in March 2016 in Nature. Their findings suggest that corruption not only harms a nation's prosperity but also shapes the moral behavior of its citizens. The results have implications for interventions aimed at tackling corruption.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/national-corruption-breeds-personal-dishonesty/
