Description du projet
Comprendre les mécanismes profonds de la corruption
La corruption est néfaste pour la collectivité, même si elle peut s’avérer coopérative du point de vue de ses participants qui se livrent à des activités malhonnêtes et frauduleuses. La psychologie du développement a exploré les origines psychologiques de la coopération souhaitable. Qu’en est‑il des origines développementales de la corruption? Le projet ORIGINSOFCORRUPTION, financé par l’UE, cherchera à répondre à cette question en examinant si la tricherie, l’ignorance stratégique et l’application inégale des normes — trois comportements de corruption paradigmatiques — sont plus susceptibles de se produire dans des contextes clés de prise de décision coopérative (collaboration mutualiste, réciprocité et coopération au sein du groupe) que dans des contextes de contrôle analogues. Pour étudier le rôle des influences culturelles, le projet se penchera également sur la tricherie collaborative dans le cadre d’expériences interculturelles avec des enfants issus de sociétés modernes industrialisées et de sociétés traditionnelles à petite échelle.
Objectif
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.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitution d’accueil
04109 Leipzig
Allemagne