The developmental origins of corruption: A cooperative perspective

Cooperation is at the core of humanitys greatest achievements but its negative consequences have hardly been considered.

Specifically, everyday corruption, while being immensely harmful to the collective, is often distinctly cooperative from the perspective of its participants (e.g., exchanging bribes, insider trading).

What are the psychological origins of such corrupt behaviors and can they be traced back to fundamental aspects of human psychology?

In the past, developmental psychology has been critical for revealing how particular social-cognitive capacities enable the participation in socially desirable cooperation. By contrast, little research has explored if the same capacities are also implicated in the emergence of corruption. The current project will fill this gap by studying the developmental origins of corruption.

For this purpose, I will examine if three paradigmatic corrupt behaviors cheating, strategic ignorance, and unequal norm enforcement are more likely to occur in key contexts of cooperative decision-making (mutualistic collaboration, reciprocity, and ingroup cooperation) than in analogous control contexts.

Developmentally, this tendency is expected to increase from age 4 to 7 as childrens cooperative capacities in these contexts gain in maturity.

In addition, I will study cooperative cheating in two cross-cultural experiments with children from modern industrialized and traditional small-scale societies.

This will reveal the role of cultural influences in the development of corruption and offer a stringent test of the hypothesis that social-cognitive skills involved in cooperation generally promote its emergence.

Together, the project will lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms supporting corruption and the role that our cooperative psychology plays in its development.

Moreover, the results have strong potential to inform efforts aimed at facilitating ethical decision-making in children and adults alike.