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  • - 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)

- Corruption is, in a way, contagious.

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