Data from: Intrinsic honesty and the prevalence of rule violations across societies

Deception is common in nature and humans are no exception. Modern
societies have created institutions to control cheating, but many
situations remain where only intrinsic honesty keeps people from cheating
and violating rules. Psychological, sociological and economic theories
suggest causal pathways to explain how the prevalence of rule violations
in people’s social environment, such as corruption, tax evasion or
political fraud, can compromise individual intrinsic honesty. Here we
present cross-societal experiments from 23 countries around the world that
demonstrate a robust link between the prevalence of rule violations and
intrinsic honesty. We developed an index of the ‘prevalence of rule
violations’ (PRV) based on country-level data from the year 2003 of
corruption, tax evasion and fraudulent politics. We measured intrinsic
honesty in an anonymous die-rolling experiment. We conducted the
experiments with 2,568 young participants (students) who, due to their
young age in 2003, could not have influenced PRV in 2003. We find
individual intrinsic honesty is stronger in the subject pools of low PRV
countries than those of high PRV countries. The details of lying patterns
support psychological theories of honesty. The results are consistent with
theories of the cultural co-evolution of institutions and values, and show
that weak institutions and cultural legacies that generate rule violations
not only have direct adverse economic consequences, but might also impair
individual intrinsic honesty that is crucial for the smooth functioning of
society.