Subtitles section Play video
-
- 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)