- Corruption is, in a way, contagious.
Corruption corrupts.
(intriguing music)
If one would actually see the map of corruption,
one would see some countries in which corruption
is very prevalent, and some countries
in which it's not so prevalent; it's actually very rare.
But this is political corruption.
This is how, on the large-scale, different states
have a predisposition to respect the norms,
to respect the rules, or to not respect them.
The question is is this global,
political, societal corruption related
to how people within these countries
will undergo some minor forms of cheating
in very simple, day-to-day things.
So when you live in a society in which, at the large scale,
the political values are those of not respecting the norms,
then there is a growing number of low-scale corruption
within all the people that live within this country.
Specifically now, in the world but particularly in the U.S.,
we are seeing a spike of mistrust.
You can rapidly imagine of the Facebook scandal,
of Trump and fake news, and many other examples
by which people are lacking the trust in the institution.
The map of corruption is not steady; it changes with time.
Societies make big changes where they become
more or less corrupt, and then one can ask
what happens downstream from these changes?
So the experiment goes like this:
it's again just throwing the dice,
and person A will throw the dice,
and then person B will throw anther dice,
and both of them will be paid
only if the dice have the same value.
But now the gain is not only himself or for herself
but also for the other party.
And this is another temptation for cheating,
because I'm not cheating for myself;
I'm also cheating for another person.
And so this notion of small solidarity
actually increases enormously,
to the point that, when this experiment is done
like say with 200 people, the fraction of equal dice
should be one-sixth of that, but almost 180 people
are getting paid in this experiment.
And one can see the amount of cheating
and see whether this amount of cheating in a dice,
in a single person that's cheating for $3, $4, $5, $6 or $7
actually correlates to the amount of corruption
that this country has at the societal level.
The results we saw of the dice experiment
show that long-term political corruption
results in the propagation of minor forms of corruption
in the people that live in these societies.
Now there is an episode of lack of trust,
and it seems to be different ways that this could undergo.
So in a way these sharp, spiking episodes
seem like a bifurcation point,
where societies do have an opportunity
to think whether they want to continue
on the way of mistrust or they want to react to it
by understanding how important trust is
to the construction of societies.
(intriguing music)