Khaberni - A recent study has shown that children's stance on bribery is not innate, but develops gradually with age, and according to the results of the study published in the British journal "Proceedings of the Royal Society B", children at early stages do not automatically tend to reject bribery, rather, this rejection is linked to their cognitive development.
A research team led by Bolivar Reyes-Jacquez, from the University of New Hampshire in the United States, clarified after experiments involving hundreds of children, that cognitive development plays a pivotal role in this context, and corruption still poses a major problem globally. But when is it determined whether someone is corrupt? And what role do age and culture generally play in this?
For a closer investigation of the development of bribery behavior in childhood, the researchers tested about 700 children from Norway, Italy, Japan, and the United States, whose ages ranged between 3 and 11 years.
In the first experiment, the children played the role of jury members in a drawing contest, where they had two drawings: one clearly better in terms of quality, while the other was accompanied by a bribery offer in the form of a gift card worth about 10 euros.
The Difference Between Bribing and Rewarding Your Child
The young jury members were asked two questions: Should the gift be kept or rejected? And which of the two drawings should win, the objectively better one or the one associated with a monetary grant?
The research team wrote "Regarding the issue of bribery, age was the only factor that allowed predicting the children's decisions"; younger children accepted the gift at a higher rate across different cultures, while older ones tended to reject it.
When choosing the winner in the contest, an increasing number of older children chose the better drawing instead of the one associated with money, even though 85% of the children older than 9 years selected the better drawing.
Older children, in particular, recognized the manipulative nature of the gift. About three-quarters of them, when asked, pointed out that the giver was aiming to influence and "wanted to win", while younger children often saw the motive as kindness.
The researchers believe that the stance on bribery is linked to cognitive development, that is, abilities like self-control and understanding the perspective of the other party. The team wrote "To understand bribery, the process must be viewed at the same time from several angles: from the perspective of the giver, the receiver, and the affected competitors", and the researchers explained that very young children often fail to do so.
When older children accepted the gift, they had other reasons, as 37% of them referred to motives related to politeness and gift-giving norms, on the basis that "a gift should not be returned", while another 31% mentioned that the motive was personal interest. Those who rejected the gift mostly justified it with fairness, where more than half of them said something like "this seems unfair or akin to cheating".
But was this decision actually based on a general sense of justice? To specifically check this, the researchers conducted a second experiment, where five pieces of candy were supposed to be distributed between two children, four pieces were distributed fairly by the supervisor of the experiment, while the child had to decide who would get the fifth piece.
Unlike the drawing contest, no child here walked away completely empty-handed, rather the issue was only about somewhat unfair distribution.
The researchers wrote "Unlike the bribery task, the candy distribution showed an interaction between the factors of country and age", where preschool children in Italy were more tolerant of unequal distribution compared to their peers in Norway or the United States, and with older children, these slight cultural differences vanished, as they rejected inequality to the same extent in all countries.
I Bribe My Kids And I'm Not Sorry
The researchers see that the different reactions in the two experiments reveal basic mechanisms in ethical learning that extend into adulthood. Ethical behavior does not only arise from an innate sense of justice but must be learned.
And although cultural influences play a role in this, such as norms related to gifts or expectations of politeness, individual maturity and upbringing appear to be also crucial factors, and whoever understands early that some gifts are not a sign of kindness, but a means to an intended influence, might later think hard about whether to accept such an offer or not.
