Replication Data for: Corruption as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Costa Rica

An influential literature argues that corruption behaves as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Its central claim is that the individual returns to corruption are a function of the perceived corruptibility of the other members of society. Empirically, this implies that if one were to exogenously increase beliefs about societal levels of corruption, willingness to engage in corruption should also increase. We evaluate this implication by utilizing an information experiment embedded in a large-scale household survey recently conducted in the Gran Área Metropolitana of Costa Rica. Changes in beliefs about corruption were induced via the random assignment of an informational display depicting the increasing percentage of Costa Ricans who have personally witnessed an act of corruption. Consistent with the self-fulfilling prophecy hypothesis, we find that internalizing the information from the display on average increased the probability that a respondent would be willing to bribe to a police officer by approximately 0.05 to 0.10.已有颇具影响力的学术文献指出，腐败具有自我实现预言（self-fulfilling prophecy）的特征。该类研究的核心论点为：个体从事腐败行为的收益，取决于社会其他成员被感知到的腐败易发性。从实证逻辑来看，这意味着若外源性提升个体对社会整体腐败程度的认知，其参与腐败行为的意愿也应相应提高。我们依托近期于哥斯达黎加大都会地区（Gran Área Metropolitana）开展的大型家庭调查中嵌入的信息实验，对这一理论推论进行检验。研究通过随机分配信息展示模块，向受访者传递哥斯达黎加民众亲身目睹过腐败行为的比例持续上升的信息，以此调整其对腐败的认知。与自我实现预言假说相符，研究结果显示：平均而言，在接收并理解该信息展示的内容后，受访者愿意向警务人员行贿的概率提升了约0.05至0.10。