Scientific American - 09.2019

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

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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.