Descrizione del progetto
Indagare a fondo la corruzione
La corruzione danneggia la collettività, anche qualora sia cooperativa dal punto di vista di coloro che vi prendono parte e si impegnano in attività disoneste e fraudolente. La psicologia dello sviluppo ha esplorato le origini psicologiche della cooperazione vantaggiosa, ma che ne è delle origini dello sviluppo della corruzione? Il progetto ORIGINSOFCORRUPTION, finanziato dall’UE, cercherà la risposta esaminando se la truffa, l’ignoranza strategica e l’applicazione iniqua delle norme, tre comportamenti paradigmatici corrotti, si verifichino con maggiori probabilità in contesti chiave di processi decisionali cooperativi (collaborazione mutualistica, reciprocità e cooperazione all’interno del gruppo di appartenenza) rispetto a contesti analoghi di controllo. Per studiare il ruolo delle influenze culturali, il progetto analizzerà inoltre la truffa collaborativa in esperimenti interculturali che coinvolgono bambini provenienti dalle moderne società industrializzate e dalle società tradizionali su piccola scala.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-STG - Starting GrantIstituzione ospitante
04109 Leipzig
Germania