(credit: flickr user: 0Four)
Approaches from a number of behavioral sciences can be used to understand human honesty. They’re not bothered with making particular judgements about whether a behavior is good or bad, but rather these approaches focus on understanding why people behave honestly or dishonestly in different situations.
Two economists at the University of Nottingham, Simon Gächter and Jonathan Schulz, have published an intriguing suggestion about the roots of dishonesty: they suggest that a corrupt social environment, rife with political corruption and tax evasion, can trickle down to the individual level and make people in such a country more likely to be dishonest in some contexts. Based on data gathering and behavioral experiments done in 23 countries, they found that people in more corrupt countries were more likely to cheat during an experiment.
The question was why—do national tendencies push the population toward more or less honesty, or do individuals drive the national tendency?
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