The Sweet Temptation of Corruption: Understanding Corrupt Actions by Experiments

This article focuses on behavioral differences across cultures in corruption experiments. To answer the question “What affects an individual’s propensity to engage in and punish corrupt actions?”, we have run corruption experiments with over 700 students by comparing individual decision-making in Germany and the U.S. We tried to attract the students by candies.
The assumption is that in environments that are characterized by lower levels of corruption, there is both a lower propensity to engage in and a higher propensity to punish corrupt acts. In contrast to our assumptions, almost 70% of the Californian offered and accepted a bribe. In Germany almost 50% of the
particiants took the opportunity to offer and 40% accepted a bribe. We found that in both countries the probabilty to bribe decreases if the participants have work experiences and increases with the time the participants spent in other countries. Additionally, in Germany men have a higher propensity to bribe than women, while in California males tend to give higher bribes compared to females. In the US, 52% of the citizens punished corrupt acts, in Germany even 80%. We also found a relationship between punishment and an individual’s field of study and between the amount of bribery and gender and the wish to work in private or public sector. Moreover, men punished corrupt acts with higher amounts than women. We explain our results by cultural differences (individualism).