On February 10th 2015, lab fellows Ann-Christin Posten and Elinor Amit presented their collaborative research project on measuring institutional corruption. Dr. Amit is an assistant professor (research) at Brown University in the department of cognitive linguistics and psychological sciences and Dr. Posten is a post-doctoral fellow in social cognition with the Economic Engineering research group at the University of Cologne in Germany. They came together to work on this project, which aims to use concrete examples to better unpack the components that make up institutional corruption. They hope to take this project further in the future by learning about the psychological processes that underlie moral judgments of institutional corruption and whether those processes are shared with more traditional moral dilemmas.
The steps in their research plan involved building a set of institutional corruption scenarios, and then getting experts on institutional corruption to judge how well the scenarios fit the definition of institutional corruption. Through this process they also hoped to identify the major components of institutional corruption and identify any major open question regarding institutional corruption.
Amit and Posten presented two examples of the scenarios of institutional corruption that they used. The first example was of a Super PAC. In the scenario, a businessman donated a large amount of money to a super PAC that supports the re-election of a congresswoman that is heavily involved in legislation that his company would benefit from. There are currently no regulations on this practice. The second example was about the prison system. In this example, a prison director wants to maximize the earnings that can be made by the prison, which involves fully or even over-booking the prison. In order to achieve this, prisoners often need to be transferred sometimes thousands of miles away from their family and friends, which distances them from their social network and leads to higher rates of recidivism. There are currently no regulations on the transfer of prison inmates. This example generated a lot of conversation as some people thought that this was not a good example; they felt it was an issue of financial constraints in which legitimate judgment calls had to be made.
After developing their scenarios, the next step in the research was to ask the experts about whether they thought that the different scenarios were actually good instances of institutional corruption. Amit and Posten were surprised by the varied responses they received just from experts in the field. When just asked if they thought that the scenarios were good examples of institutional corruption only three of the ten did not reach statistically significant levels. The highly diverse written responses given in the comments, however, suggest that things are not as clear-cut as they seem and that there is no consensus even among the experts regarding what qualifies as institutional corruption. Some reasons for this might be that there was no set definition for institutional corruption that the experts were told to judge the cases based on and that it was sometimes unclear what the missions of the organizations in the scenarios were.
A scenario on research funding was found to be the best example while a scenario on think tanks was found to be the worst example of institutional corruption. A careful comparison of the differences and similarities in the two examples led to three possible hypotheses of why the research scenario was so much better than the think tank scenario. The first hypothesis was that intentionality is inferred from lack of transparency. The second was that conflicts of interest matter only when there is a lack of transparency, and the final hypothesis was that influence matters only when there is a lack of transparency. Further analysis needs to be done to find out which, if any, of these hypotheses have any truth to them. One important general insight found from all of the comments is that the non-visual quality of the scenarios might make them much harder to judge.
After analyzing all the comments and coding them, Posten and Amit were able to come up with some of the crucial components of institutional corruption based on recurring ideas that were mentioned in the comments about the scenarios. The first category discussed included conflicts of interest, harm to public interest, mission drift, or undermining of the mission of the institution. Another component thought to be important was influences, and the revolving door between government and the private sector. Violation of public trust, disclosure/ transparency, and awareness/intentionality were frequently discussed in the comments as well. Finally, they discussed the need to avoid the appearance of corruption and whether or not the behavior is systematic or more of a personal moral transgression. With these components they were able to measure the weaknesses and strengths of each scenario based on how many of the components they contained.
Amit and Posten concluded with a discussion of the possible future directions of their research project. They hope to measure all different kinds of psychological processes that are related to institutional corruption so that they can examine how people judge these dilemmas and find out what people want to do about these cases. Some dimensions of the psychological processes to look at could include moral permissibility, intentionality attributions, and the implications this has for blame, solutions, and trust. In conclusion, the overall goal of this research project is to see what people think about institutional corruption, which is important because perception affects eventual behavior. This process will get us closer to eventually applying interventions.
-- Summary by Lianna Llewellyn