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Category: Communication

Description: Experimental studies of corruption often employ variants of a simple one-shot paradigm based on the so-called “Trust game”. We present a new paradigm in which the opportunity to act corruptly is embedded in a meaningful task that participants perform. We discuss advantages of this new approach in comparison to the traditionally used paradigms and present results from its first implementation in a laboratory study of corruption. Refraining from corrupt behavior was perceived as moral and it was associated with higher scores on the honesty-humility scale from the HEXACO personality inventory. Trial-level analysis showed that response times were longer for trials with bribes and even longer for trials in which bribes were accepted, suggesting that acting corruptly may require overcoming an automatic honest response.