Cheating

The New Scientist takes a look at corruption

If you think you're incorruptible, think again. Nobody is immune, but understanding that may make dishonesty easier to counteract

Most of us think of ourselves as pretty honest, seeing corruption as something that involves other people. But new research shows that anyone can be corrupted at the drop of a hat. Indeed, when looked at in evolutionary terms, clinging to the moral high ground could be seen as an irrational position. If everyone else is cheating, then playing by the rules will leave you with the smallest haul – where the haul, whatever it is, translates sooner or later into reproductive success. So it makes perfect sense to be as devious as you can while at the same time exhorting everyone to be honest. “I think of hypocrisy as the background state,” says psychologist Rob Kurzban. Clinging to the moral high ground could be seen as an irrational position


If we are mostly honest, most of the time, that may just be down to a lack of opportunity to cheat. That is certainly what as-yet-unpublished research by Samuel Bendahan and colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne indicates. They have devised a game in which players must distribute a sum of money between themselves and their “employees”. There are three options: raise your employees' salaries at your own expense, maintain both parties' rates, or reduce employees' salaries and take home a fatter pay packet – the “theft” option.

Asked beforehand how they should behave, barely 4 per cent of players condoned theft. Indeed, those given control of just one employee refrained from stealing during 10 successive rounds of the game, which was played for small amounts of real money. However, people allocated three employees – giving them more power and more to gain from underhand dealing – soon departed from their initial moral stance. After the first five rounds, 20 per cent had resorted to theft. And, if people were offered more ways to profit at their employees' expense, by round 10 the figure had increased to 45 per cent.

The corrupting influence of power has also been demonstrated by Joris Lammers at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and Adam Galinsky at Northwestern University in Chicago. They primed individuals to feel powerful or powerless by getting them to recall a past incident in which they had experienced one of these feelings. They then split each group in two, asking half to rate certain hypothetical acts on a scale of morality, and others to play a game of dice in an isolated cubicle, reporting their scores to a lab assistant. Possible scores for the game fell between 1 and 100, with higher scores bringing bigger rewards. Dice being a game of chance, the average score should have been around 50, but it was actually 70 for the group primed to feel powerful. Empowered individuals were prone to cheating, say Lammers and Galinsky, yet they were also harsher in their condemnation of immoral acts than were people primed to feel powerless. And they were hypocritical, judging such acts to be less blameworthy if carried out by themselves than by others.

The British historian and politician Lord Acton was clearly right when he said “all power tends to corrupt”. But power doesn't simply provide more opportunity for underhand dealings – it also influences the way we think. Lammers believes that it brings about a kind of moral myopia. “I liken the effects to those of alcohol. Alcohol narrows your focus and it also leads to behaviour which you could call hyper-self-confident or hyper-assertive.” He points out that colleagues at Tilburg, led by Maarten Boksem at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, have monitored people's brain activity while they were being primed to feel powerful, and found that areas associated with disinhibition were activated.

Power is not the only thing that brings out our dishonest tendencies. Psychological distance also seems to make it easier to perform a corrupt act. Behavioural economist Dan Ariely, at MIT, has found that people cheat more readily for tokens which can be exchanged for money than for money itself. Acting via an intermediary is another way of distancing oneself. Danila Serra of Florida State University in Tallahassee, who is investigating the role of intermediaries in corruption, says there are several reasons for this. One is that the intermediary removes uncertainty by giving a tariff for a certain service, such as bribing a politician, and in doing so helps to normalise the act. What's more, even if intermediaries are merely hired guns, their existence reduces the risk of punishment for their clients and creates an illusion of shared responsibility. A good example is the recent phone hacking scandal in the UK, in which some journalists from the now defunct News of the World newspaper paid private detectives to access people's voicemail messages.

In fact, where there is a culture of it, corruption seems almost to be contagious. Each year, Transparency International publishes a list of nations ranked according to corruption levels. Based on surveys of analysts and people in business, its Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) has been criticised for lack of objectivity, but Serra's research suggests it does reflect people's behaviour. Working with Abigail Barr at the University of Oxford, she conducted a series of experiments with Oxford undergraduates hailing from 34 countries covering a wide range of CPI rankings. Each person had to decide whether or not to bribe an official for a service, such as being moved up a hospital waiting list. The pair found that people from countries with the worst CPI scores were more likely to engage in bribery. Barr and Serra concluded that our propensity to engage in corruption is strongly cultural, reflecting the social norms of the country in which we live.

Given our tendency to baseness, anti-corruption campaigners have their work cut out. But the news from the lab is not all bad. One ray of hope lies in the discovery that individuals can become less corrupt. When Barr and Serra repeated their experiment, they found that a person's tendency to bribe declined the longer they had spent in the UK. The pair also made an intriguing observation that suggests some individuals might be less susceptible to corrupting cultural influences in the first place. While the corruptibility of undergraduates reflected the CPI ranking of their home countries, the same was not true of graduates – those from countries where corruption is higher tended to be more honest than undergraduate compatriots who had spent equal amounts of time in the UK. Barr and Serra see these people as non-conformers who could one day fight corruption back home. “We think of them as agents for change,” says Serra.

The problem is identifying such people. So far, the hallmarks of incorruptibility remain elusive. All Serra and Barr can say is that their graduate students are a self-selecting group whose decision to study abroad for a PhD makes them unusual. Similarly, Bendahan has found no characteristic that consistently protects people from the corrupting influence of power, even though over 300 students have played his game to date. An initially honest individual, for example, is not immune. Neither does an altruistic outlook or a strong desire to recognise the contribution of others help. The only clue comes from Ariely's research. He has found that the more creative a person, the more likely they are to cheat. “A lot of dishonesty is about being dishonest while telling yourself a story about why this is really okay,” he says, and creative people may be better at that.

A more promising way to reduce levels of corruption might be to beef up the deterrents. Kurzban believes that the only reason people ever consider not cheating is because others occasionally hold them to account. Punishment certainly works in laboratory experiments. When people play cooperative games for a reward, they are far more likely to resist cheating if they know that other players could fine them for trying to profit at the expense of the group. In real life, the punishment inflicted on a cheat tends to be social disapproval, ranging from ostracism to incarceration. In recent months, for example, five British politicians have served prison sentences for fiddling their expenses.

Of the many forms corruption can take, one of the most pernicious and hardest to eradicate is that perpetrated by elite groups against the majority of their fellow citizens, according to Peter Turchin, a population biologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. Using mathematical modelling to study human societies, he has found that throughout history this kind of corruption has been a good indicator of a mature state on the verge of collapse.

In a flourishing, nascent society, resources are shared more or less equitably, there is full employment and the population is in a growth phase, Turchin says. With time, population outgrows the demand for labour, the price of labour drops and employers grow rich. This causes inequalities to widen and makes the elites proliferate and compete with each other for power and patronage. If one elite succeeds in grabbing a bigger slice of the pie than others, trouble won't be far off.

History is full of such examples. In 16th-century France, four decades of civil war were precipitated in part when competition between aristocratic clans resulted in the House of Guise elbowing out other noble families. A more recent example of an elite group grabbing too much power, Turchin says, was the election of the former CEO of oil services provider Halliburton, Dick Cheney, as vice president to George Bush. He also notes that Egypt saw a quadrupling of graduates, a classic sign of a burgeoning elite, in the decade leading up to the Arab Spring.

There is evidence that mobilising social disapproval can reduce corruption. In Indonesia, Olken tested the impact of various anti-corruption measures on embezzlement from road-building projects. The most effective method was to increase the number of audits, though it didn't even have to go that far. “Just sending a letter saying the state audit agency is going to come and look at this project reduced that missing expenditure number by about a third,” he says. Grassroots measures were less successful. Olken found that holding accountability meetings at which officials explained to local people how they had disposed of the budget made little difference. However, lab experiments carried out by Serra suggest that anonymous complaints can reduce corruption provided they are logged centrally and trigger an official investigation once a threshold number has been reached.

Finally, on the grounds that powerful people are the ones we should be most worried about, Bendahan says that power should come with more built-in checks and balances. People seeking power must expect restrictions on that power in the form of democratic control, he says. Ariely agrees, but he adds that those at the top must first recognise their corruptibility, something they often fail to do – as illustrated by Nixon's famous “I'm not a crook” speech. It would appear that the first lesson we should all learn from the burgeoning field of corruption research is that nobody is immune.

Blink

I don't know how you are about women in symphony orchestras. I suppose it's alright for them to be violinists of flautists, but when it comes to the big brass instruments like trombones... well it's a fact that women have smaller lungs than men. Can you envision a woman playing a trombone of a tuba?

That is exactly how German orchestra bosses felt in the 1980s. Then they started holding auditions behind screens and lo and behold, some of the best trombone players were women. I came upon this story in Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, which is about the power that our subconscious has over us.

This power is made use of in speed dating, where couple have 5 minutes to meet and greet and then move on to the next victim. It's all about first impressions; couples either hit it off instantly or they do not. Mature reflection might mean it's a disastrous match, but it's surprising how strong that first impression can be.

Most of us would agree that we are not facially prejudiced. Mature reflection tells us that skin color has nothing to do with ability of how pleasant a person is. But tests developed to test our subconscious first impressions indicate that 80% of us are prejudiced and that includes 58% of black people who also prefer white! It may be that our language - black marks, black-hearted, blackguards, dark motives - has conditioned us, but there is no doubt that this instantaneous reaction is there.

You can see it in cop-shootings. A young black American is far more likely to be inadvertently shot by police in America than a young white man. In situations we think of as dangerous we are far more likely to rely on our first impressions than our mature reflections.

You can see it in voter's choices too. Warren Harding is universally regarded as the worst President ever in America. Yet he was tall, handsome, with wonderful hair and a marvelously reassuring voice. He was remarkably handled by his chief of staff and was easily elected. Yet the signs were there. He arranged to be absent for Senatorial debates on the two big issues of his day, women's suffrage and prohibition. But the first impression he gave was marvelous. In the UK, we might say the same about Tony Blair. It is a fact that we tend to elect tall men with regular features and a pleasant manner. We were very lucky to get the short fat and bald Winston Churchill.

Recognizing that we have this subconscious mind making decisions that may be at odds with our mature reflections which should be listen to? Freud had an answer: he said that for simple decisions we should lay out the pros and cons and think about our choice, but that complex decisions were too complicated to think about and that we should rely on our subconscious. You are more likely to spot an Art fraud or laugh at a joke on first impressions than on detailed examination

Why doctors get sued.

Malpractice insurance is one of the great deterrents to practising medicine in America. A study has shown that three minutes is all it takes. Doctors who get sued spend an average of 15 minutes with their patients while those who are never sued spend an average of 18 minutes.

But it's not the time, but how the time is spent that is the real difference. Doctors who are never sued are more likely to make orienting comments like, "First I'll examine you and then we will talk the problem over" or "I will leave time for your questions" which give patients an idea of what the visit about and when they ought to ask questions. Never-sued doctors engage in 'active listening', saying such things as "Go on, tell me more about that," and they were far more likely to laugh and be funny during the visit. On the other hand there was no difference in the amount of information conveyed.

The interesting thing is that the patients takes in the doctor's attitude within the first few seconds of the consultation. It all boils down to 'Does the doctor respect the patient?' The most corrosive tone of voice that a doctor can adopt is a dominant one. Patients have been known to sue the wrong doctor because they liked one (who had made the mistake) and despised the other (who was entirely innocent). The truth is that all doctors make mistakes but patients are only vindictive if the doctor has not formed a caring relationship with him or her.

I have this information from a book given to me by my older son who was visiting last weekend. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell examines first impressions and hunches. Our unconscious brain makes and early decision that is not available to our conscious thought until minutes, days or even weeks later. Most of us don't trust these first impressions and sometimes we are right not to. The book explores when we should override this censorship.

IQ

When I was a medical student there was a fellow student who stood out by being older. He was a dentist who had decided to retrain as a doctor to fulfil his ambition of becoming a facio-maxillary surgeon. He was in his thirties, drove a smart car and always had money that the rest of us couldn't imagine. He had an expression that he used whenever any of the year behaved as 'medical students' (drinking, partying, going to bed at dawn). He would murmur with disdain, "Top two per-cent."

What he was getting at was the fact that the exam system weeded out those with the top two per-cent of IQs to go to medical school. However, having a higher yet IQ doesn't win you any coconuts. You need a certain threshold IQ (say 120), but above that, other things mater for success in life.

Christopher Langan, with an IQ of 200, (my IQ is apparently 163 according to my parents; Einstein's was only 150) is supposed to be the cleverest man in America. He came to fame as a winner on the TV show One versus One Hundred. From a very young age he read and re-read ever more complicated books. He put in the 10,000 hours required to make himself an expert. Ask him anything and he has the answer.

Yet Chris Langan is a failure in life. He has never achieved anything of note during his lifetime (apart from winning quiz shows). He has twice dropped out of College. His background was terrible. His mother had four boys with four different fathers. The man who stayed with her longest was a drunk who beat up both mother and children. He won a scholarship, but lost it because his mother was too indolent to fill in the forms. He lived in poverty which caused him to miss classes and he was insufficiently persuasive with the college administration for them to make allowances for him despite his high intellect.

Robert Oppenheimer was a similar child prodigy, but he came from a privileged background. There were books at home, intellectual conversation, and a social mores that taught you how to behave. He went to Harvard and the as a PhD student to the other Cambridge University in England. In England he deliberately tried to poison his tutor, Patrick Blackett (who would later win the 1948 Nobel prize for physics). Oppenheimer was carpeted, but after protracted negotiations he was put on probation and booked into sessions with a Harley Street psychiatrist; not the usual punishment for attempted murder in England (which at that time retained the death penalty).
Later, Oppenheimer went on to head up the Manhattan project which produced the first two nuclear devices. He was a long-shot for this post. He was just 38, junior to many of the scientists he would have to manage. He was a theorist in a job that called for experimenters and engineers. He had many communist friends. He had no administrative experience. He was very impractical, he walked about in a funny hat and knew nothing about equipment. one of his colleagues said, "He couldn't run a hamburger stand."

What he did have was charm. He could charm the birds from the trees and his charm worked on General Groves, the rather stiff and disciplinarian engineer whose approval he needed to implement his ideas.

The particular skill that enables you to talk your way out of an attempted murder rap is called by psychologists, 'practical intelligence'. A lot of politicians have it. It includes knowing what to say and to whom, when to say it, and how to say it with maximum effect. Analytical intelligence is largely genetic, but social savvy is a learned behavior. That's where wealth, good schools and privilege come in. You can't improve analytical intelligence much, but you can improve practical intelligence. You can also improve your ability in divergence tests. Here is a test for you. In the 'Comments' write down how many uses you can imagine for a] a brick, and b] a blanket.

The ideas in this article come directly from Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers