Social norms of corruption in the field: social nudges on posters can help to reduce bribery

Abstract

Corruption in the form of bribery continues to be a major societal challenge around the world. The current lab-in-the-field study tested whether dynamic descriptive norms messages on posters can help to reduce bribery. Before, during and after placing posters throughout a medium-sized South African town, incentivized measures of social norms and bribery were assessed in a mobile lab. A total of 311 participants stemming from the general population took part. In line with the pre-registered predictions, the results reveal that people: (1) perceive bribery to be less common; and (b) engage in bribery in a corruption game less frequently when the posters were displayed. The discussion outlines how social norms nudging campaigns can be leveraged to spur collective action against corruption.

All by myself? Testing descriptive social norm-nudges to increase flood preparedness among homeowners

“…10 Several recent examples of studies that do not identify treatment effects of social norm-nudges are in line with our results: in the environmental domain (Chabé-Ferret et al, 2019;Mackay et al, 2019) and the financial domain (Franklin et al, 2019). Generally, it has been noted for various domains, including corruption (Köbis et al, 2019) and obesity 10 A possible explanation for the lack of effect of susceptibility to peer influence on our treatments is that we sampled adults from 18 to 90 years old, while most research on susceptibility to peer influence has been conducted on adolescents (Eckel et al, 2011;Prinstein et al, 2011). To control for this explanation, we reran our analysis (not reported here) for Hypothesis 4 on a subset of respondents younger than 25 years old, and we found the same pattern of results as in the full sample.…”

Collaborative dishonesty: A meta-analytic review.

“…Specifically, in collaborative settings, people are exposed to others’ behavior, which becomes socially normative behavior (Bicchieri, 2016: Cialdini et al, 1990; Soraperra et al, 2017). Several studies show that social information about other people’s ethical rule violations increases people’s own propensity to break ethical rules (Ferrali, 2020; Gächter & Schulz, 2016; Gino et al, 2009; Keizer et al, 2008; Köbis et al, 2015; Köbis, Troost, et al, 2019; Kocher et al, 2018; O’Fallon & Butterfield, 2012; but see Dimant et al, 2020). Recent work on collaborative dishonesty indeed finds that one group member’s lies increase the likelihood that the partner will also lie (Gross et al, 2018), and that having rule followers in a group mitigates the spread of collaborative dishonesty (Gross & De Dreu, 2021).…”

A dual process social psychological model of corrupt intention and attitudes toward corrupt people.

“…Corruption is a regrettably salient issue across many nations with large estimated impacts on economic growth and inequality (Chêne, 2014). Prior social psychological work has investigated normative pressures on corrupt behavior, such as the impact of descriptive and injunctive norms (Köbis et al, 2015) and its importance to curb corruption in some contexts (Köbis et al, 2019). Here we provide the first systematic research examining the impact of social attitudes and worldviews on corruption intention and attitudes toward corrupt people to identify key individual difference variables that motivate corruption-related outcomes in the high corruption context of Brazil.…”

“…Notably, Köbis et al (2019) used this assumption to propose an intervention seeking to reduce corruption in a field setting. By highlighting the decrease of corruption in South Africa—as identified by Transparency International (2017)—through posters in distinct places with this information, the level of engagement in corrupt behavior was significantly reduced in the KwaZulu-Natal region.…”