Public honesty and institutional integrity

An interesting study which raises more questions than it answers. From Intrinsic honesty and the prevalence of rule violations across societies by Simon Gächter and Jonathan F. Schulz. The abstract.

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. Psychological, sociological and economic theories 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 experiment. 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 honesty. 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.

One study, unrepresentative sample, all the usual caveats. The suggestion from the evidence seems to be that the individual behaviors manifested in a culture are at least correlated with the objective measures of corruption in the institutions of that culture. Honest citizens have honest institutions but that says nothing about causal mechanisms or direction of causal flow.

It does pose interesting questions about such public policy issues as immigration. To the extent that OECD countries permit immigration, those that do permit it tend to focus on allowing in either those with a clear prospect of wealth creation (highly educated) or those granted access on humanitarian grounds.

The public fear of immigration in most countries is rarely an issue of xenophobia but a combination of two issues - the political elite being insulated from the will of the people, and the economic and social consequences of immigration being visited upon the lowest social quintiles in terms of crime, economic competition, etc.

If the above research ends up being robust, it suggests that perhaps immigrant selection ought, in part, be based on compatibility with host country norms of trust and honesty.