Power is said to corrupt, and now experts have found individual people living in corrupt countries are also more likely to be dishonest.

A study has revealed individual honesty tends to be greater in societies with low degrees of corruption, tax evasion and political fraud, and vice versa.

While Austria, the Netherlands and the UK ranked highly for honesty in the research, Tanzania and Morocco, whose quality of institutions was marked as 'low', scored poorly.

A study has shown individual honesty tends to be greater in societies with low degrees of corruption, tax evasion and political fraud, and vice versa. The four graphs above show 'corrupt' countries such as Morocco and Tanzania scored poorly, compared with more 'honest' countries such as the UK, Austria and Sweden

Simon Gächter and his colleagues at the University of Nottingham came up with a 'prevalence of rule violations' (PRV) index to measure 159 countries.

They used available data from 2003 on political fraud, tax evasion and corruption.

They then conducted a die rolling experiment among 2,586 young people aged 22 on average from 23 representative countries, including Vietnam, Morocco, China, the UK, Spain, Sweden, Italy and the Czech Republic.

The participants were too young to have influenced the index that drew on 2003 data.

The 22-year-olds were each asked to roll a die in private and report the outcome.

In the experiment, higher numbers translated to higher earnings and it was simple for participants to report inflated numbers for a small amount of extra money.

The team discovered a 'robust link' between the prevalence of rule violations and intrinsic honesty.

This means individuals from countries with a low incidence of rule breaking were found to be less likely to lie in order to get extra cash, compared from those from 'corrupt' countries.

The study therefore suggests high exposure to rule breaking makes people more likely to stretch the truth.

However, few individuals were either fully honest or dishonest in their manipulation of the numbers.

The participants were each asked to roll a die in private (set up pictured) and report the outcome. In the experiment, higher numbers translated to higher earnings and it was simple for participants to report inflated numbers. The team discovered a 'robust link' between the prevalence of rule violations and intrinsic honesty

The study suggests high exposure to rule breaking in countries where bribery is common, for example, makes people more likely to stretch the truth to gain more money. This chart shows the rankings. The higher the number in the 'Prevalence of Rule Violations' column, the more dishonest a country was, on average

Dr Gächter told MailOnline: 'Even in the high corruption countries people are surprisingly honest in the sense that only a minority lie blatantly, although the incentive in the experiment are to lie maximally by claiming the highest amount possible irrespective of the die rolled.

'This behaviour is consistent with psychological theories of honesty that people care about honesty but sometimes stretch the truth a bit in a way to maintain an honest self-image and to benefit materially.'

The study, published in the journal Nature concluded: 'The results are consistent with theories of the cultural co-evolution of institutions and values, and show that weak institutions and cultural legacies 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.'