The Role of Intuitive Processes in Judgement and Behaviour concerning Corruption

• In Event: Polarization and Fear in Comparative Politics

Abstract

Corruption, a violation of impartiality in public affairs by using public office for private gain, has been at the centre of much inquiry due to its association with a plethora of societal and systemic ailments. But much of this inquiry has been characterised by a dispassionate approach to human behaviour, stemming from a view of corruption best summarised by Kiltgaard (1988), who wrote that "corruption is a crime of calculation, not passion". This view conceptualises corruption as a choice consciously made by individuals who consider the risks and benefits of engaging in corruption. Furthermore, most studies of corruption have focused on what You (2015) called the "demand side" of corruption, which centres solely on the role and behaviour of public officials and ignores what guides citizens to engage in and tolerate or condemn corruption.

In this paper, I propose that we can not discount the processes that operate outside conscious reasoning when it comes to individual-level judgement and behaviour towards corruption. Additionally, more attention should be paid to how common citizens interact with corruption. In line with studies of moral psychology, such as the Social Intuitionist Approach (Hadit 2001) and of evolutionary morality, such as the Morality as Cooperation Approach (Curry 2016), I argue that to better understand judgement and behaviour concerning corruption, we also need to pay attention to the role of an intuitive process, in particular moral intuitions, understood as hunches or feelings about where an action or situation falls on the wrong-right spectrum, for which moral emotions are a key component. argue that intuitive processes have an important role in how people judge and behave towards corruption. Furthermore, I posit that the judgement of corruption is inherently linked to the moral domain of fairness, and thus, activating intuitive processes linked to fairness can lead to further condemnation and lower engagement in corruption. This activation can be done through the inducement of moral emotions linked to fairness evaluations, such as anger and built, and I expect the effect of these induced emotions to be conditional on social identity and social trust. Importantly, my argument does not discount previous explanations but rather dialogues with and seeks to complement them.

To study whether intuitive processes have any role in judgement and behaviour in relation to corruption and what this role can be, I conducted an experiment in two non-representative samples of citizens from Peru (a comparatively high corruption case) and the UK (a comparatively low corruption case). In the experiment, I first induced two moral emotions (anger and guilt) and then asked participants to evaluate a scenario of corruption. For the UK, I focus on a scenario of corruption as favouritism, where participants have to evaluate and decide whether the use of personal connections to access public services (social housing), which I posit presents a dilemma between intuitions linked to large-scale fairness and intuitions linked to smaller-scale group loyalty and kinship. While for Peru it depicted a bribery situation where participants had to evaluate and decide whether to bribe a public servant to expedite a bureaucratic procedure (renewal of ID), which I posit presents a social dilemma where there was not a clear moral justification for engagement in corruption, but rather, this engagement could be seen more as the product of self-interest.

To induce moral emotions in the first part of my experiment I used the autobiographical recall technique, which is widely used in psychology to induce emotions. In this technique, participants are asked to recall situations in which they experienced the target emotions, which puts them in the same emotional state. In the context of my studies, this technique allowed me to induce emotions as separate from corruption judgment tasks, which in turn allowed me to establish a causal role of moral emotions as intuitive processes. I expected to find that these induced emotions would lead to less engagement and harsher judgement, with these effects being conditional on generalised trust and social identity.

My results show that induced emotions have a significant effect on reported behaviour and judgement concerning corruption, which provides evidence in favour of the role of intuitive processes in shaping judgement and behaviour related to corruption. Still, some of my results went against my initial expectations and rather pointed towards the need to account for contextual fairness.

Author

• Viviana Baraybar Hidalgo, University of Oxford