Why bribery
works and what changes its effectiveness
Carnegie Mellon University
A new study from Carnegie Mellon
University suggests that greed, and not the willingness to return the favor, is
the main reason people give in to bribery. But the research also finds there are times when the almighty buck can be ignored and effects of a bribe can be lessened.
The study indicates that when
incentives are dependent on choices, people accept and reward bribes. On the
other hand, when bribes are not contingent on delivering a certain outcome,
they don't distort judgment nearly as much.
In the Carnegie Mellon experiment, pairs of participants wrote original jokes and submitted them to a judge, who was tasked with deciding which pun was the funniest. Joke-tellers could blindly submit bribes up to $5.
When judges were allowed to keep
only one bribe, nearly 90 percent of them chose the joke that came with the
most money. The better joke (as determined by independent evaluators) was
selected just 60 percent of the time.
"Quality was basically ignored
when the person could pocket the winner's bribe," said Silvia Saccardo,
the Carnegie Mellon assistant professor of social and decision sciences who led
the study. "Nearly every person went with the money."
The results were different when the
judges could keep both bribes. They selected the better joke 84 percent of the
time. In fact, they overwhelmingly chose the person who wrote the funnier joke
even when they offered the lower bribe.
"When the referees' payoff
didn't depend on the choice of winner, bribery didn't distort judgment,"
said Saccardo, a faculty member in CMU's Dietrich College of Humanities and
Social Sciences. "And because they sided with quality instead of a higher
payoff, it's an indication that in our data reciprocity isn't a driving factor
when it comes to bribes."
The researchers, who also include
scientists Uri Gneezy from the University of California San Diego and Roel van
Veldhuizen from WZB Berlin Social Science Center, created one final scenario in
the study that provided a clue that greediness can actually be overcome.
Rather than allowing participants to
bribe the judge when they submitted their jokes, joke-tellers had to wait two
minutes. The extra time allowed the judges to objectively read and evaluate the
submissions before seeing any money. They could keep only the winner's money;
they chose the better joke 81 percent of the time.
"When a bribe arrives before
you have time to make an unbiased decision, you 'conveniently' convince yourself
that a subpar proposal is actually the best one," Saccardo said.
"It's more difficult to justify your own dishonesty once you've already
made a decision before receiving a bribe."
The researchers replicated the main
conditions of the study at a market in India using a taste-test. The results
were consistent.
The World Bank estimates nearly $1
billion exchanges hands in bribes every year. By learning more about the ways
our behavior and moral judgment can be affected through bribery, the
researchers hope to identify ways to minimize its effect.
"Our results suggest that
policy interventions that focus on increasing the moral costs of distortion and
limit the scope for self-serving biases may provide a successful way to reduce
the effectiveness of bribes," Saccardo said. "An example is requiring
evaluators to follow objective evaluation criteria."