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The developmental origins of corruption: A cooperative perspective

Descripción del proyecto

Llegar al fondo de la corrupción

La corrupción resulta nociva para el colectivo, aunque podría considerarse cooperativa desde la perspectiva de quienes participan en actividades desleales y fraudulentas. La psicología del desarrollo ha explorado el origen psicológico de la cooperación deseable. ¿Qué pasa con el origen desarrollista de la corrupción? El proyecto financiado con fondos europeos ORIGINSOFCORRUPTION buscará una respuesta examinando si es más probable que comportamientos como hacer trampas, la ignorancia estratégica y la aplicación desigual de normas —tres ejemplos paradigmáticos de la corrupción— se produzcan en contextos clave de toma de decisiones cooperativa (colaboración mutualista, reciprocidad y cooperación dentro del grupo) que en contextos de control análogo. Para estudiar el papel de las influencias culturales, el proyecto evaluará también los engaños colaborativos en experimentos interculturales con niños tanto de sociedades modernas industrializadas como de sociedades pequeñas tradicionales.

Objetivo

Cooperation is at the core of humanity’s 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 children’s 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.

Régimen de financiación

ERC-STG - Starting Grant

Institución de acogida

UNIVERSITAET LEIPZIG
Aportación neta de la UEn
€ 1 498 442,00
Dirección
RITTERSTRASSE 26
04109 Leipzig
Alemania

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Región
Sachsen Leipzig Leipzig
Tipo de actividad
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Enlaces
Coste total
€ 1 498 442,00

Beneficiarios (2)