The developmental origins of corruption: A cooperative perspective

Project Information

ORIGINSOFCORRUPTION

Grant agreement ID: 948748

DOI

10.3030/948748

EC signature date 13 January 2021

Start date 1 November 2021

End date 31 October 2027

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 498 442,00

EU contribution

€ 1 498 442,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAET LEIPZIG
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - ORIGINSOFCORRUPTION (The developmental origins of corruption: A cooperative perspective)

Reporting period: 2024-11-01 to 2026-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Cooperation is at the core of humanity’s greatest achievements, but it has hardly been considered when and under what conditions cooperative behaviors can have negative consequences. For example, everyday corruption (e.g. exchanging bribes, insider trading), while being immensely harmful to the collective, is often distinctly cooperative from the perspective of its participants. What are the psychological origins of such 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 corrupt tendencies. The current project aims to fill this gap by studying the developmental origins of cooperatively motivated rule violations. For this purpose, we examine if three ethically questionable behaviors – cheating, unequal norm enforcement, and strategic ignorance – are more likely to occur in key contexts of cooperative decision-making than in analogous control contexts. Developmentally, this tendency is expected to increase from age 4 to 8 as children’s cooperative capacities in these contexts gain in maturity. In addition, the current project aims to investigate cooperative cheating in two cross-cultural experiments with children from modern industrialized and traditional small-scale societies. The findings will add to our understanding of the role of cultural influences in the development of cooperatively motivated rule violations and offer a stringent test of the hypothesis that social-cognitive mechanisms involved in cooperation generally promote the emergence of such rule violations. 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. As a consequence, the results have the potential to inform efforts aimed at facilitating ethical decision-making in children and adults alike.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project investigates whether the development of cooperative motives can encourage young children to transgress. For this purpose, we have conducted – or are in the process of conducting – 10 studies involving over 700 German children aged 4 to 8 examining their tendency to a) cheat in games, b) show partiality when enforcing rules, and c) engage in strategic ignorance, that is, to avoid information about the negative consequences their own behavior.
Cheating: We first demonstrated that, from a neutral observer perspective, 5-8-year-olds evaluate cheating negatively, even when it is prosocially motivated and when the beneficiary of the cheating act had previously benefited the transgressor. In behavioral experiments, however, 7-8-year-olds tended to cheat to benefit a partner, especially if that partner had previously shared a resource with them, indicating that the motive to reciprocate favors can encourage young children to violate rules they otherwise approve of. We now investigate from what age children display this tendency and whether also cheat more when collaborating with a partner towards a shared purpose compared to when acting alone.
Unequal norm enforcement: The impartial enforcement of norms and laws is a hallmark of fair societies. A series of experiments revealed that an appreciation of this fact develops early: children aged 5 and older consistently disapproved of individuals who enforce norms unequally. Further, by age 6-7 children accept mitigating circumstances as a reason for unequal norm enforcement but specifically condemn enforcers who selectively spare transgressors out of favoritism. In behavioral experiments, by contrast, children tended to protect transgressors whom they owed a favor, suggesting that the motive to live up to one’s cooperative obligations can compromise impartial norm enforcement already in young children.
Strategic ignorance: In a series of studies, we currently explore when children first deliberately avoid information they could easily acquire and if they do so strategically to license selfishness. Next, we investigate if children deploy strategic ignorance specifically for cooperative ends (e.g. when pursuing joint goals).
Thus far, the project has already accumulated strong evidence that, while showing a principled rejection of cheating and the partial sanctioning of transgressions, the motive to reciprocate favors can lead children to contribute to engage in these exact behaviors, revealing a dark side of cooperation already in early childhood.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Previous research has established that young children reliably develop capacities for cooperation. While these proclivities for cooperation and prosociality have many positive consequences, the current research program investigates whether they also have a dark side. The project results indicate that, indeed, cooperative motivations, such as the motive to reciprocate favors, can encourage young children to cheat and to show partiality in response to others’ norm violations. Importantly, these are behaviors young children – often the same children – comprehensively condemn, suggesting that, from their inception, cooperative motivations can encourage children to behave in ways they themselves judge to be wrong. On a conceptual level, these findings challenge conventional notions of prosocial and cooperative behavior as inherently positive and morally praiseworthy. They suggest instead that a comprehensive understanding of prosocial development necessitates the acknowledgment that, in addition its important personal and collective consequences, prosocial and cooperative inclinations can have socially detrimental effects. Moreover, the current work highlights as an important developmental challenge to learn how to balance and negotiate different moral principles – being nice to others, showing loyalty, playing by the rules – which can at times be in opposition to one another. On an applied level, the results can provide important guidance to practitioners by offering a more nuanced framework of the conditions under which prosocial and cooperative behaviors ought to be fostered and when they deserve questioning.
In upcoming projects, we will explore whether other cooperative contexts (e.g. mutualistic collaboration) can equally elicit normative transgressions in young children. We will also investigate how children’s information search, specifically their willful avoidance of specific information, impacts their cooperative decision-making. Finally, in a cross-cultural research project, we will investigate the development of cooperative cheating in children from several societies.