Bribery across nations

Abstract Curbing bribery presents a global grand challenge. Increasingly bribery occurs across national jurisdictions. While behavioral approaches to study bribery have gained popularity to help design better anti-corruption policies, research has merely examined bribery within single nations. Here we provide first behavioral insights on cross-national bribery. We ran a pilot study (across three nations) and a large incentivized online experiment using a bribery game played across 18 nations (total N = 6,472). Results uncover that people offer bribes to interaction partners from nations with a reputation for being corrupt. People widely agree on expectations about a nation's bribery acceptance levels, but these expectations negatively correlate with reality, indicating incorrect shared expectations about bribery. The national background of one’s interaction partner matters more than one’s own national background for the emergence of cross-national bribery. The findings advance behavioral science of ethical behavior that has focused individual behavior by revealing a strong social influence from the respective interaction partners. Our behavioral insights also inform evidence-based anti-bribery policies and question previous cultural-deterministic views on bribery.