Thursday, May 7, 2020

Corruptive Actions: Antisocial Behavior - Juniper Publishers

Psychology and Behavioral Science - Juniper Publishers


Abstract

This article identifies several key issues of corruptive behaviors. Why did the corruption case start? We seek out the immediate causes and circumstances of the corrupt transaction and action. It is very significant to focus on the personality characteristics and the individual’s conducts as anti-social behaviors. The more we know about corruptive behaviors, the better we can decide which policy instruments to use to combat corruption. It first discusses the definitions of corruption and bribery and its relationships with some variables. It then, explores the corruptive actions as antisocial behavior in organization. In doing so, it draws on key psychological issues and factors that conduct of corrupt behavior in social context.

Introduction

The word corruption is universal. Corruption is a major obstacle to development. Many other areas in the social sciences (e.g., economics, political science, and sociology) have devoted considerable research to understanding antecedents to national corruption. However, little research has explored psychological antecedents—specifically, personality measured at an aggregate level. Psychologists argue that nice and clean man may change his/her behavior based on social and family pressures and circumstances Corruption is typically defined as “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain”, Transparency International (2014), and usually occur s where private wealth and public power overlap [1], Rose-Ackerman (1999). A corrupt act typically requires three parties: a corrupter, a corruptee and a disadvantaged party. One party, often a public official, abuses a position of power, often by accepting or demanding a payoff. The second party, often a private party, a corporate body, a representative, or even another public official (e.g. judiciary executive, a police officer etc.) is either forced or to or seeks to make a payoff to the first party. The third party is external to the decisions made but adversely affected by them. For example, if a private party bribes a public official to receive a valuable government contract, then then the private party and the official both benefit from the transaction, but the third party, in this case the wider public, may suffer if the private party is not the best candidate for the contract. Our experiment will consider a setting with three such parties [2].

Bribery is often defined as the offer, promise, exchange, Acceptance, or solicitation of an advantage or tangible item as an incentive to perform an act that is illegal or unethical. Bribes can take the form of physical gifts, loans, favors, fees, rewards, donations, or other advantages. Experimental research on corruption has grown in the last years but is still in its infancy [1]. Prior experimental studies have focused on individual determinants of corruption and consider the influence of an individual’s gender, religion culture, amount of wages, the amount of bribe, level of monitoring and punishment (Ina, & Michael, 2015). Why did this corruption case start? In that case, we seek out the immediate causes and circumstances of the corrupt transactions and decisions. We look directly at the corrupt acts themselves from psychological and social cognitive viewpoint.

Corruptions, simply put, the abuse of power and trust for personal and private gain. It is antisocial behavior, which is learnt through nastiest parenting. Effective parenting by implication, aims at primarily the first type family climate for a congenial socialization of the individual, as well as, a healthy development of his/her personality and self. Researchers have generally converged on defining corruption as the miss-use of public power for private benefit [3], which, for example, includes bribery, embezzlement, or kickbacks but excludes acts such as petty or violent theft or political instability. In this definition, corruption is not limited to government: public power refers not only to power held over the public by government officials but also more broadly to power held over groups in industry and communities. Although multiple definitions of corruption exist in the literature and across cultures, many universal trends underlie corruption, such as the exploitation of power, the selfish orientation of the corrupt actor, and the detrimental effects of corrupt acts on the society in which they occur [4].

Individual and Work

a. Individual: Character and Private circumstances
b. Work: Type, Colleagues, Contacts

Organization

a. Leadership
b. Organization structure
i. Size, complexity
ii. Control, auditing
iii. Separation of responsibilities
c. Organization culture
i. Goals/mission
ii. Values and norms
iii. Operational code
d. Personal (Policy)
i. Training and Selection
ii. Rewarding
e. Environment
i. Juridical/law
ii. Political-administrative
iii. Societal (e.g. criminality) [5,6]/p>
Organizations can consist of individuals who are not inherently corrupt or criminal, but who engage in acts that later are identified as criminal. As a leading scholar in social psychology, Professor John Darley, has written, „Some of the people who launch corruption-initiating acts do not scrutinize these contemplated acts from an ethical perspective. Strange as it may seem, they do not see them as unethical [7].

Corruption as Anti-social Behavior

The basic question “what explains corrupt behavior” has long plagued scholars and practitioners [8]. Organizations can consist of individuals who are not inherently corrupt or criminal, but who engage in acts that later are identified as criminal. It has recently received renewed attention in policy and academic circles because, despite the rise and spread of the global anticorruption movement, many highly corrupt countries have made little progress on reducing corruption [9,10].
Antisocial behaviors exist along a severity continuum and include repeated violations of social rules, defiance of authority and of the rights of others, deceitfulness, theft, and reckless disregard for self and others. Antisocial behavior can be identified in children as young as three or four years of age. If left unchecked these coercive behavior patterns will persist and escalate in severity over time, becoming a chronic behavioral disorder. Highrisk factors in the family setting include the following:
i. Parental history of antisocial behaviors
ii. Parental alcohol and drug abuse
iii. Chaotic and unstable home life
iv. Absence of good parenting skills
v. Use of coercive and corporal punishment
vi. Parental disruption due to divorce, death, or other separation
vii. Parental psychiatric disorders, especially maternal depression
viii. Economic distress due to poverty and unemployment
Corruptive actions include coercive conducts as maladaptive behaviors engaged in as a means of avoiding or escaping aversive events. Coercive behavior may include whining, noncompliance, and lying. Coercive behavior [11]. The psychological and personality traits of corruptive individual: Disregard for society’s laws, violation of the physical or emotional rights of others, Lack of stability in job and home life, irritability and aggressiveness, lack of remorse, consistent irresponsibility, recklessness, impulsivity, deceitfulness [12].

Rational choice theory has long dominated the academic study of corruption, Anti-corruption practice and policy approaches. It explains corruption as the function of calculating, strategic, selfinterested behavior. In this view, corruption is particularly likely to occur in situations of power asymmetry, where some individuals (agents) hold power over others (principals). Yet, rational choice explanations make assumptions about motivations that may not be valid. Psychology, political psychology, and behavioral economics have posed serious challenges to rational choice theories of human behavior. That rational choice theories “explain how one should reason, not how one actually reason” and they do not adequately explain how people “make decisions to reach an outcome” Parents serve as the first socializing agents. Specially, sound family environmental ways persist disciplines moral and obedience lessons [4,13].

Hofstede & McCrae [14] contrasted viewpoints about the relative roles of personality and culture in determining the characteristics of societies. The analyses here suggest that both national personality and national culture provide unique information in predicting national corruption. As one reviewer pointed out, there is likely considerably more variability in personality and values within a nation than across nations [9,15]. This certainly means that individuals within a given nation do not all behave similarly, particularly in the case of corruption. in environments that are characterized by lower levels of corruption, there is both a lower propensity to engage in and a higher propensity to punish corrupt actions. We therefore focus on the correlations between an individual’s propensity to engage in and punish corrupt acts, depending on the amount of bribe and punishment and certain socio-demographic characteristics such as gender, religion, field of study, income, work experience, time spent in other countries, and experience with corruption [2]. Behavioral ethics in general, as well as corruption (as an important form of unethical behavior) have gained increasing public and scholarly interest during the last decades. The number of publications on the topic has grown rapidly, not only in the field of behavioral ethics but also in almost all major social sciences [15].

Kahneman [16] indicated that, even if an individual begins to discern a possible ethical or legal problem associated with his organization’s receipt or payment of bribes, confirmation bias is highly likely to affect his ability to process and action that initial perception, as it influences that individual to look for and accept more innocent or less malign explanations for others’ corrupt actions (while, consistent with ethical fading, enabling him to reinforce his self-image of being ethical). On the other hand, the faulty intuition and mental shortcuts represent the key types that can influence individual into participating in corrupt behavior, such as overconfidence effect, reciprocation, scarcity [7].

In sum, Antisocial behavior can be broken down into two components: the presence of antisocial (i.e., angry, aggressive, or disobedient) behavior and the absence of prosocial (i.e., communicative, affirming, or cooperative) behavior. Most children exhibit some antisocial behavior during their development, and different children demonstrate varying levels of prosocial and antisocial behavior. Corruptive actions represent one of antisocial behavior that require psychological treatment and prevention strategies in social context and organization. 

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