Approaches from a number of behavioral sciences can be used to understand human honesty. They’re not bothered with making particular judgements about whether a behavior is good or bad, but rather these approaches focus on understanding why people behave honestly or dishonestly in different situations.

Two economists at the University of Nottingham, Simon Gächter and Jonathan Schulz, have published an intriguing suggestion about the roots of dishonesty: they suggest that a corrupt social environment, rife with political corruption and tax evasion, can trickle down to the individual level and make people in such a country more likely to be dishonest in some contexts. Based on data gathering and behavioral experiments done in 23 countries, they found that people in more corrupt countries were more likely to cheat during an experiment.

The question was why—do national tendencies push the population toward more or less honesty, or do individuals drive the national tendency?

Trickle-down dishonesty

To try to establish which way the effect runs, Gächter and Schulz used their data collection to explore two different points in time. They started out by collecting information on political corruption, tax evasion, and fraud in 2003, using it to create an index of the “prevalence of rule violations” (PRV) in 159 countries. Next, they conducted behavioral experiments between 2011 and 2015, studying adults who had been children in 2003 and therefore were far too young to have affected the kinds of dishonesty measured by the PRV.

These adults—more than 2,500 of them, from 23 countries ranging from low to high PRV scores—played a game in which they had to roll a die twice, in private, and report the result of the first roll. They would win more money for a higher number unless they rolled a six, which carried no prize at all. So, a five would win five “money units,” while a two would win two money units.

(The amount of money in a unit was calibrated to local currency so that exchange rates wouldn't give people in poorer countries a bigger incentive to cheat.)

The rolling of the dice wasn't monitored, so it’s not possible to tell on an individual level whether people cheated in the experiment and reported a number they didn’t roll. However, we know from statistics how a fair die is expected to behave if it were rolled thousands of times: all numbers are reported one-sixth of the time, and people claim 2.5 money units on average. If people are lying about their results, a country’s die-rolling data looks very different, so we can guess that people are being dishonest in their reports.

It’s also possible to tell apart different levels of dishonesty. If everyone lies all the time, they would all claim five money units. But people might feel better about bending the rules by reporting the higher die roll (rather than the first die roll) rather than reporting a number they hadn’t rolled at all. The researchers call this “justified dishonesty.”

The results were far from full dishonesty, but they were anything but honest. Instead, they clustered around the “justified dishonesty” level. In countries that had high honesty levels, participants were more honest than the justified dishonesty level, claiming 3.17 money units on average. In low-honesty countries, people claimed 3.53 money units on average, placing them a bit beyond the justified dishonesty level. This means that they were more likely to lie outright about the number they had seen.

Overall, there was a correlation between a country’s PRV level and the amount of money its citizens claimed, with people from low-honesty countries claiming more money. Other results backed up the finding, like more reports of rolling a six (probably honest, because this resulted in no payment) in high-honesty countries.

Culture and confounds

Because the adults they tested were too young to have caused the nationwide dishonesty measured in 2003, the authors say there’s evidence for the trickle-down effect. However, it's not quite so clear-cut. It's possible that corrupt politicians and tax evaders growing up in previous decades may have absorbed a particular set of cultural norms about honesty and then gone on to create nationwide corruption.

Participants who were children in 2003 might have been exposed to the same norms that created the corruption and absorbed their ideas about honesty there rather than getting their ideas from nationwide levels of corruption. That means the experiment doesn’t rule out a reverse direction of causality, from the individual to the national level.

In fact, the researchers looked at individual attitudes about honesty and fairness, finding that people who indicated that honesty was very important to them were more likely to report rolling lower norms. However, they don't report whether these personal beliefs were patterned on a country-wide level, so we don't know how they relate to PRV.

Another important question is what other characteristics the countries might share. Many of the high-honesty countries also appear to be high-income (like Austria, the UK, and the Netherlands), while the low-honesty countries are much poorer (Colombia, Guatemala, Georgia). In fact, the authors report that GDP per capita is a highly significant factor in establishing PRV. It’s possible that people in the high-honesty countries were more highly educated and likely to realize that a dishonest answer would somehow be picked up by the researchers.

The authors acknowledge these influences: “Taken together, our results suggest that institutions and cultural values influence PRV, which...impact[s] on people’s intrinsic honesty and rule-following.” Ultimately, their idea about the trickle-down effect rests more on past experiments suggesting that people might pick an honesty strategy based on their surroundings. For instance, people have been found to break rules like littering more in areas where they saw rules being broken regularly.

Whatever direction the effect runs in, the correlations are robust. There's a link between dishonesty at the individual and national levels. Understanding more about why this is could help us to gain a better understanding of what makes people choose to be honest and dishonest.

Nature, 2015. DOI: doi:10.1038/nature17160 (About DOIs).