Corruption

(A different perspective)

I was wondering why are people corrupt, and that too majority of the people. Can’t the people
survive without corruption? Why they are still involved in corruption even knowing that they
are corrupt? Or are they even aware of the fact that they are corrupt? What I’m trying to say
is the decision they are making by being corrupt is influenced externally or is it totally their
own decision?
I recently saw a video which further, even scientifically justified what I was trying to say
earlier in my article on free will. Actually there were two videos, both of them TED talks by
the same person – Dan Ariely. First one was – Are we making our own decisions, the second
– Beware of conflict of interest. Here are some excerpts from the talks.
I

I will tell you a little bit about irrational behaviour. And I want to start by giving you some
examples of visual illusion as a metaphor for rationality. So think about these two tables. And you
must have seen this illusion. If I asked you what's longer, the vertical line on the table on the
left, or the horizontal line on the table on the right? Which one seems longer? Can anybody see
anything but the left one being longer? No, right? It's impossible. But the nice thing about visual
illusion is we can easily demonstrate mistakes. So I can put some lines on I've proven to you that
your eyes were deceiving you. Now, the interesting thing about this is when I take the lines
away, it's as if you haven't learned anything in the last minute. You can't look at this and say,
"Okay now I see reality as it is." Right? It's impossible to overcome this sense that this is indeed
longer. Our intuition is really fooling us in a repeatable, predictable, consistent way. And there is
almost nothing we can do about it, aside from taking a ruler and starting to measure it.
Here is another one -- this is one of my favourite illusions. What do you see the colour that top
arrow is pointing to? Brown. Thank you. The bottom one? Yellow. Turns out they're
identical. Can anybody see them as identical? Very very hard.

Vision is one of the best things we do. We have a huge part of our brain dedicated to vision --
bigger than dedicated to anything else. We do more vision more hours of the day than we do
anything else. And we are evolutionarily designed to do vision. And if we have these predictable
repeatable mistakes in vision, which we're so good at, what's the chance that we don't make
even more mistakes in something we're not as good at -- for example, financial decision
making: something we don't have an evolutionary reason to do, we don't have a specialized part
of the brain, and we don't do that many hours of the day. And the argument is in those cases it
might be the issue that we actually make many more mistakes and, worse, not have an easy way
to see them. Because in visual illusions we can easily demonstrate the mistakes; in cognitive
illusion it's much, much harder to demonstrate to people the mistakes.

So I want to show you some cognitive illusions, or decision-making illusions, in the same
way. And this is one of my favourite plots in social sciences.
It's from a paper by Johnson and Goldstein. And it basically shows the percentage of people who
indicated they would be interested in giving their organs to donation. And these are different
countries in Europe. And you basically see two types of countries: countries on the right, that
seem to be giving a lot; and countries on the left that seem to giving very little, or much less. The
question is, why? Why do some countries give a lot and some countries give a little? When you
ask people this question, they usually think that it has to be something about culture. Right? How
much do you care about people? Giving your organs to somebody else is probably about how
much you care about society, how linked you are. Or maybe it is about religion. But, if you look at
this plot, you can see that countries that we think about as very similar actually exhibit very
different behaviour. For example, Sweden is all the way on the right, and Denmark, that we think
is culturally very similar, is all the way on the left. Germany is on the left. And Austria is on the
right. The Netherlands is on the left. And Belgium is on the right. And finally, depending on your
particular version of European similarity, you can think about the U.K and France as either similar
culturally or not. But it turns out that from organ donation they are very different. By the way, the
Netherlands is an interesting story. You see the Netherlands is kind of the biggest of the small
group. Turns out that they got to 28 percent after mailing every household in the country a letter,
begging people to join this organ donation program. But whatever the countries on the right are
doing they are doing a much better job than begging. So what are they doing? Turns out the
secret has to do with a form at the DMV. And here is the story. The countries on the left have a
form at the DMV that looks something like this. Check the box below if you want to participate in
the organ donor program. And what happens? People don't check, and they don't join. The
countries on the right, the ones that give a lot, have a slightly different form. It says check the box
below if you don't want to participate. Interestingly enough, when people get this, they again don't
check -- but now they join.

Now think about what this means. We wake up in the morning and we feel we make
decisions. We wake up in the morning and we open the closet and we feel that we decide what
to wear. And we open the refrigerator and we feel that we decide what to eat. What this is
actually saying is that much of these decisions are not residing within us. They are residing in the
person who is designing that form. When you walk into the DMV, the person who designed the
form will have a huge influence on what you'll end up doing. Now it's also very hard to intuit these
results. Think about it for yourself.

II

So, I was in the hospital for a long time. And a few years after I left, I went back, and the
chairman of the burn department was very excited to see me -- said, "Dan, I have a fantastic new
treatment for you." I was very excited. I walked with him to his office. And he explained to me
that, when I shave, I have little black dots on the left side of my face where the hair is, but on the
right side of my face I was badly burned so I have no hair, and this creates lack of
symmetry. And what's the brilliant idea he had? He was going to tattoo little black dots on the
right side of my face and make me look very symmetric.
It sounded interesting. He asked me to go and shave. Let me tell you, this was a strange way to
shave, because I thought about it and I realized that the way I was shaving then would be the
way I would shave for the rest of my life -- because I had to keep the width the same. When I got
back to his office, I wasn't really sure. I said, "Can I see some evidence for this?" So he showed
me some pictures of little cheeks with little black dots -- not very informative. I said, "What
happens when I grow older and my hair becomes white? What would happen then?" "Oh, don't
worry about it," he said. "We have lasers; we can whiten it out." But I was still concerned, so I
said, "You know what, I'm not going to do it."

And then came one of the biggest guilt trips of my life. This is coming from a Jewish guy, all right,
so that means a lot. And he said, "Dan, what's wrong with you? Do you enjoy looking non-
symmetric? Do you have some kind of perverted pleasure from this? Do women feel pity for
you and have sex with you more frequently?" None of those happened. And this was very
surprising to me, because I've gone through many treatments -- there were many treatments I
decided not to do -- and I never got this guilt trip to this extent. But I decided not to have this
treatment. And I went to his deputy and asked him, "What was going on? Where was this guilt
trip coming from?" And he explained that they have done this procedure on two patients
already, and they need the third patient for a paper they were writing.

Now you probably think that this guy's a schmuck. Right, that's what he seems like. But let me
give you a different perspective on the same story. A few years ago, I was running some of my
own experiments in the lab. And when we run experiments, we usually hope that one group will
behave differently than another. So we had one group that I hoped their performance would be
very high, another group that I thought their performance would be very low, and when I got the
results, that's what we got -- I was very happy -- aside from one person. There was one person in
the group that was supposed to have very high performance that was actually performing
terribly. And he pulled the whole mean down, destroying my statistical significance of the test.

So I looked carefully at this guy. He was 20-some years older than anybody else in the
sample. And I remembered that the old and drunken guy came one day to the lab wanting to
make some easy cash and this was the guy. "Fantastic!" I thought. "Let's throw him out. Who
would ever include a drunken guy in a sample?"

But a couple of days later, we thought about it with my students, and we said, "What would have
happened if this drunken guy was not in that condition? What would have happened if he was in
the other group? Would we have thrown him out then?" We probably wouldn't have looked at the
data at all, and if we did look at the data, we'd probably have said, "Fantastic! What a smart guy
who is performing this low," because he would have pulled the mean of the group lower, giving
us even stronger statistical results than we could. So we decided not to throw the guy out and to
rerun the experiment.

But you know, these stories, and lots of other experiments that we've done on conflicts of
interest, basically kind of bring two points to the foreground for me. The first one is that in life we
encounter many people who, in some way or another, try to tattoo our faces. They just have the
incentives that get them to be blinded to reality and give us advice that is inherently biased. And
I'm sure that it's something that we all recognize, and we see that it happens. Maybe we don't
recognize it every time, but we understand that it happens.

The most difficult thing, of course, is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own
incentives. And that's a much, much more difficult lesson to take into account. Because we don't
see how conflicts of interest work on us. When I was doing these experiments, in my mind, I was
helping science. I was eliminating the data to get the true pattern of the data to shine through. I
wasn't doing something bad. In my mind, I was actually a knight trying to help science move
along. But this was not the case. I was actually interfering with the process with lots of good
intentions. And I think the real challenge is to figure out where are the cases in our lives where
conflicts of interest work on us, and try not to trust our own intuition to overcome it, but to try to
do things that prevent us from falling prey to these behaviours, because we can create lots of
undesirable circumstances.

Basically what he explains in the talks is that when we are brought in front of a situation
where we have to make a decision, we try to skip the decision making part and tend to go on
with the default option. Like the organ donation example he talks about. This not because we
care less about the decisions but due to the fact that we (in general sense) actually care a lot
about these decisions. Secondly when there is no way out, which is often the case, our
decisions are inherently biased, and i.e. when conflict of interest comes interest comes into
play.
Now let’s apply this in a situation where a person is faced with a decision he has to make, and
there is corruption involved. And just for the simplification consider the Indian ecosystem,
though this narrows down the discussion a little, yet it would be easier to analyse as we are
familiar with the settings here. Let’s take the example where he is a bureaucrat and one of his
junior officers has taken a bribe and he comes to offer him his part of the bargain. You see
that he is not directly involved in corruption but will be put into same category as the one
directly involved will be. So, what do you think will he do?
The general approach of behaviour prevails and most of the people in this situation will opt
for the default option i.e. to take the part offered and make no fuss. On the contrary if this
person was directly offered a bribe then he would have to make a decision which he had
avoided in the earlier case when he asked his junior to look into the matter. This is why we
find corruption even at the root level.
So, he is offered a bribe, now many factors come into play here. General thought process of
the people is – Even if I don’t take it someone else will take it, so what’s the point in
rejecting it? Also in the ecosystem which has been developed over the years in India, if one is
perfectly non-corrupt he would have a hard time doing his job, he will be frequently
transferred, or even eloped in fake cases as he was not letting his ecosystem function
properly. These are the reasons when we totally ignore the lust of physical pleasures which
one gets when he is economically strong.
When we go through all these factors we find out that this conflict of interest is not a conflict
at all, the result is given. We unconsciously weighing all these factors become corrupt and
thus corruption prevails in India.
Now you decide do people (barring some out of the world pieces, but they don’t qualify as
human so its fine, I think) really choose to be corrupt?

- Sankalp Patel
IIT – Delhi
10/3/15
References:
 TED talk – Are you making your own decision – Dan Ariely
 TED talk – Beware of conflicts of interest – Dan Ariely