Intrinsic Honesty and the Prevalence of Rule Violations across Societies

Abstract

Deception is common in nature and humans are no exception ¹ . Modern societies have created institutions to control cheating, but many situations remain where only intrinsic honesty keeps people from cheating and violating rules. Psychological ² , sociological ³ and economic theories ⁴ suggest causal pathways about how the prevalence of rule violations in people's social environment such as corruption, tax evasion, or political fraud can compromise individual intrinsic honesty. Here, we present cross-societal experiments from 23 countries around the world, which demonstrate a robust link between the prevalence of rule violations and intrinsic honesty. We developed an index of the Prevalence of Rule Violations (PRV) based on country-level data of corruption, tax evasion, and fraudulent politics. We measured intrinsic honesty in an anonymous die-rolling experiment. ⁵ We conducted the experiments at least eight years after the measurement of PRV with 2568 young participants (students) who could not influence PRV. We find individual intrinsic honesty is stronger in the subject pools of low PRV countries than those of high PRV countries. The details of lying patterns support psychological theories of honesty. ^{6, 7} The results are consistent with theories of the cultural co-evolution of institutions and values ⁸ and show that weak institutions and cultural legacies ^{9- 11} that generate rule violations not only have direct adverse economic consequences but might also impair individual intrinsic honesty that is crucial for the smooth functioning of society.