Understanding Bribery and Corruption

..and how to combat it

Wherever bribery is mentioned corruption is there. This is because all cases of bribery are corruption cases but not all cases of corruption involve bribery. As a working definition, bribery is the act of giving and receiving unauthorized sums of money or substitutes whiles corruption is using ones official office to give or to receive favours. Therefore, every act of bribery involves two parties, the giver and the recipient. As a result, there can be two perspectives to a single case of bribery. I will attempt to provide an in-depth analysis of bribery and corruption from a social-cognitive psychological perspective.
The social-cognitive theory is one of the key theories in psychology that was propounded by a renowned psychologist called Bandura. According to him, there is a reciprocal interaction between behavior, person (thought, disposition, perceptions, etc) and the environment. What this means is that a person’s behavior is a function of himself and his environment while at the same time the behavior that emerges affects both the person and the environment. For instance, engaging in bribery will mean that the social milieu permits the person to give and the person thinks it is ok to give but after giving the behavior creates the expectation that such an act is appropriate in that environment. There are certain concepts that we should understand: outcome expectancy, vicarious learning and reinforcement. Outcome expectancy is our expectation of the consequence of our actions; vicarious learning is learning to perform an act by observing and imitating others; and reinforcement equates reward or preferable outcomes. From a behavioral or social-cognitive perspective, bribery or corruption is undesirable behaviors that are sustained by its outcome expectancy and/or actual reinforcement and are learnt either through vicarious learning or actual experience.
From the recipient’s standpoint, how is the behavior of bribery and corruption learnt and sustained? It is typically learnt vicariously (that is by observing others do it and get rewarded). No Ghanaian is born with the idea of demanding or receiving bribes. Most of us pick the behavior from observing others do it. A basic law in Psychology is that behaviors that are followed by preferable consequences are likely to be repeated whereas those followed by unpreferable consequences are less likely to recur. This is known as the Law of Effect. What does this mean in terms of learning to demand or receive bribe? Often times we observe people in our workplaces take bribe and do not get punished and when they even get caught and punished the punishment given them are not “punishing” enough to discourage that undesirable behavior. Consider this: a public servant steals $200, 000.00 and gets sentenced for 5 years without refunding the money. What is the implication? It is simple. Each year in prison is equivalent to $40, 000.00 and no civil servant in Ghana can make that much in a year. It therefore means that it a lucrative ‘business” to steal that much or even more and get caught and get sentenced because that really makes you rich. It is “kyinkyin soosoo”. The good people of Ghana may think that the culprit has been punished. But as psychologists we know that certain outcomes may not necessarily be unpleasant in the long-run because it is like delaying gratification; the intensity of punishment differs from person to person, from time to time and even within the same person at different times. That is the intensity of the unpleasant consequence is important in communicating to onlookers that indeed bribery and corruption is really a bad thing.
Another factor is what is known in psychology of learning as contingency trap, the fact that the consequence of certain behaviors are so separated that people are unable to associate the behavior with that consequence. A good example is smoking and cancer and a good example still is corruption and its consequence. Sometimes, it takes too long for culprits to be arrested and punished such that the association or contingency between the two is simply broken. As a result, anyone engaged in corruption hardly thinks of being caught and punished. Constant monitoring is important and in view of this the whitleblowers’ bill is a step in the right direction.
Most discussions on corruption always include something on salary levels and conditions of service. Collectively, these constitute the compensation package. From organizational justice or equity standpoint, when employees are underpaid they try to get even by either changing their work inputs (eg effort) or outcomes or their perceptions. As a result, we will expect that underpaid workers will find ways of increasing their work outcomes (compensation) and bribery and corruption are definitely ways of getting even from that standpoint. This is a person variable. This viewpoint also says that when employees are unable to change their work inputs or outcomes for lack of opportunity they will change their perceptions. The implication is that though salary levels play a role, the surest way will be to eliminate the opportunity to engage in the act in the first place. If the public can report any civil servant who tries to take money from them for doing their job and be punished severely I believe even though there is the opportunity, no civil servant will want to stick his or her neck.
Whiles all these happen, the new employee forms expectations about the consequences of engaging in this undesirable behavior in the workplace. The co-workers do it and don’t get punished severely and at times it is even rewarding. The vicarious learning has its major effect when the person being modeled is the supervisor. The logic is simple: if a high-authority figure engages in that behavior in this workplace then it must really be acceptable. If ACPs are observed by constables to be engaged in corruption then it means it is really good. That is the supervisor and the peers at work are teaching him “the ropes”, organizational socialization. Based on one’s outcome expectancy, when one faces a situation in which it is possible to exhibit the behavior they will for all the reasons given above.
What then sustains it from the standpoint of the giver? There is a similar process. There is vicarious learning. We often times see that a job applicant who is able to give bribe gets the job. The communication is unambiguous: give bribe if you want to get the job. We continue to give bribe because it is instrumental in getting us what we desire in the end. And as the law of effect has it we will continue the behavior that is rewarding. This makes not giving bribe in certain situations punishing because being law-abiding is simply not going to get you what you want. Similar to the recipient’s perspective, the giver who may have not engaged in corruption before also forms outcome expectancy and will give bribe when faced with similar or the same situation in the future. Even though there may be some unpleasant consequences, there appear to be no formal forms of punishment for the giver and even if there are any they are never enforced. We should remember in some cases the giver provides the opportunity to engage in corruption, unsolicited gifts. Another problem is what we psychologists call stimulus generalization, tendency to exhibit the same behavior in situations that are similar to the original situation in which that behavior was effective. After giving bribe to get out of a legal problem, we will give bribe to nurses so that we are attended to first or even “bribe death to postpone our due dates”. Stimulus generalization can be implicated in the pervasiveness of corruption in all spheres of our life.
My recommendation is very straightforward, cut to the chase: governments and organizational leaders should break the link between the act of corruption and the beneficial consequences that currently follow it and strengthen the link between corruption and severe punishment. I cannot disclose the details of breaking the link in this article for professional reasons and lack of space. Creating fear of punishment can actually help step up the campaign on zero tolerance of corruption. Based on what is known in psychology of learning as variable time schedule of reinforcement which in its original version means that rewarding people after varying period of time has elapsed, can be modified to help organizational leaders and governments combat corruption. In this unique situation, variable time schedule of investigation (instead of reinforcement) will mean communicating to employees that some undercover investigators will come around just at any time to check on how they are doing with regards to corruptions and this will put them on alert because they can’t tell exactly when they will come around and that just about anybody who walks into their office on any given day could be the undercover investigator. That is the fear of being caught will be created to deter employees. This is a common practice for some companies in the West. They pay undercover investigators who help them monitor their front-end employees, like sales executives and in assessing customer care provided by their employees. Both the giver and recipient should be punished in case their actions are detected. This is because punishing both creates fear in both the giver and recipient and as a result both the act of giving and receiving will be deemed as unlawful.
Let’s all be the undercover investigators for the government in reporting crime. That is the only way people will become of scared of demanding bribe. The media provides us with an avenue to report such crimes. I invite others to this intellectual discourse on corruption.