Study links bribery with collectivism

Toronto Sun:

Bribery is viewed as morally wrong across cultures, but the question remains why some places are more prone to corruption than others.

According to research by Pankaj Aggarwal and Nina Mazar, two professors at the University of Toronto, part of the answer seems to be the level of collective feeling in a society.

The team 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.

Aggarwal and Mazar suggest 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.

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