Scientific American - 09.2019

(Darren Dugan) #1
Illustration by Lisk Feng September 2019, ScientificAmerican.com 63

CONTAGIOUS


DISHONEST Y


DISHONESTY BEGETS DISHONESTY, RAPIDLY SPREADING


UNETHICAL BEHAVIOR THROUGH A SOCIETY


By Dan Ariely and Ximena Garcia-Rada


BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS

Dan Ariely is James
B. Duke Professor of
Psychology & Behav-
ioral Economics at
Duke University and
founder of the Center
for Advanced Hind-
sight. He is co-cre-
ator of a documenta-
r y on corruption and
a bestselling author.

Ximena Garcia-
Rada is a doctoral
candidate of market-
ing at Harvard Busi-
ness School. She stud-
ies how social factors
”§ær§ZrZ«§Òæ¡rÍ
decision-making.

Imagine that you go to City Hall for a construction permit to renovate your
house. The employee who receives your form says that, because of the great
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The extent of bribery is hard to measure, but esti-
mates from the World Bank suggest that corrupt ex-
changes involve $1 trillion annually. In 2018 Transpar-
ency International reported that more than two thirds
of 180 countries it surveyed got a score of less than 50
on a scale from 0 (“highly corrupt”) to 100 (“very
clean”). Major scandals regularly make global head-
lines, such as when Brazilian construction company
Odebrecht admitted in 2016 to having paid upward of

$7oo million in bribes to politicians and bureaucrats
in 12 countries. But petty corruption, involving small
favors between a few people, is also very common.
Transparency International’s Global Corruption Ba-
rometer for 2017 shows that one in every four of those
surveyed said they had paid a bribe when accessing
public services in the previous year, with almost one
in three reporting such pay ments in the Middle East
and North Africa.
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