Psychology of Corruption (Pakistani Style)

By Bina Shah @ www.dawn.com

Recently people have been discussing a somewhat sensational YouTube video clip in which a minister from the country’s ruling party appeared on a television talk show panel, and in reply to some hard questioning from the moderator on the subject of corruption, made the unbelievable claim: ‘Corruption is our right’ (‘corruption hamara haq hai’).

Immediately, Twitter, Facebook and Pakistani blogs went up in flames as people expressed their outrage at the honourable minister’s brazen embrace of the dark side of Pakistani politics. Others applauded, in only the most ironic way, the minister’s courage and honesty at expressing a sentiment that seems to have been the philosophy of most of our rulers and politicians for at least the last 30 years.

But whether you believe the minister was a madman or a superhero, with the NRO having been struck down last week, corruption has come out of the closet with a vengeance.

The minister’s statement should be analysed in its entirety, though, as doing so provides an important clue to the mentality behind both large-and small-scale corruption. When pressed to explain himself by both the panel moderator and the other guests, he spluttered, ‘Look, is not corruption our right? Corruption has become a part of our culture. Think about everyone else who is engaging in corruption. If we don’t do the same thing, won’t it be to our loss? If a thousand people are engaging in corruption, the one who does not is only hurting himself.’

A shocked silence and some guffaws followed this display of logic on the YouTube clip, and you couldn’t be blamed for wondering if the minister really understood the implications of his own disingenuousness.

This clip, combined with the statistic being bandied about on the Internet that the corruption money involved in the NRO amounts to a staggering figure of one trillion rupees, enough to clear up a significant amount of our debt, made me wonder not about the future of the NRO beneficiaries, or who’s going to be arrested and who’s going to cough up, but about a more fundamental question: how did we get here in the first place?

In order to answer this, it’s helpful to look at the psychology that lies behind corruption. Gary Novak, an ‘independent scientist’ behind the blog ‘Science is Broken’, likens corruption to the stimulus-response reactions of Pavlov’s dogs: corruption is a series of developed reactions to the same situation that have been strengthened with time and repetition.

You start with the assumption that prevailing over someone else, winning the game of life, is to your advantage. How do you win ‘the game’? By dictating terms that are favourable to you and to the detriment of others at the same time. According to Novak, ‘Built upon the desire to prevail are all other forms of corruption. Degrading others or their realities or property makes it easier to prevail. Gaining something from it is exploitation. Lying stifles the competing influences of others.’

In this paradigm, there’s no space for cooperation, for justice, for fairness. It’s all about who’s better, bigger and stronger than the other, and also about how you use your advantages to crush your opponent into the ground by taking away his or her assets.

As with Pavlov’s dogs, who required the positive reinforcement of food that trained them to keep salivating every time the bell rang, the positive reinforcement in this paradigm is power. According to Novak, ‘Acquiring power is the purpose of corruption, since power is needed to prevail over other persons. When succeeding, power is acquired, and its desirability causes the behaviour to be repeated.’

The positive rewards — the acquisition of money, power, and influence — are instantaneous, and influence the human psyche with the same strength as cocaine affects the brain; whereas the negative ones — heavy punishment, the loss of assets and reputation — are slow to accrue, and therefore are of much less consequence.

Finally, the nature of the stimulus-response ‘means that the reward of power is stored in the same memories as the corrupt acts, creating a positive reinforcement for repeating the behaviour’.

The act of corruption thus becomes so automatic in the human brain that ‘it escapes the awareness of the perpetrator of corruption’.

When called to attention by the questioning on a television talk show, or by being arrested and required to appear in court, what comes to light in the person’s attempt to explain and defend himself is the attitudes and beliefs that are embedded in the person’s mind, showing that corruption is more than just a physical response to stimulus: it is a complete sense of purpose and philosophy that has taken hold over that person’s view of life.

As Novak says, ‘the desire to prevail against someone is domination. This means that the desire to dominate is the most basic cause of corruption. Flowing from it are all other corruptions, which are interdependent.’

So does it all boil down to the fact that nobody wants to give up the chance to get the biggest slice of the pie? Are our rulers psychologically addicted to corruption, or is Pakistani democracy just a front for kleptocracy? The answers lie in psychology, again: in the principles of operant conditioning as developed by Pavlov, and later B.F. Skinner. These psychologists showed that you can influence and change behaviour by using either positive or negative reinforcement. Just as Pavlov trained his dogs to salivate at the ringing of a bell, they could equally be trained out of that conditioning so that eventually the ringing of a bell would produce no reaction in them.

This is not to suggest that Pakistani politicians are salivating dogs, but rather than once the positive reinforcement for corruption is taken away and replaced by negative reinforcement, this behaviour, too, will change.

Instead of delivering power, money, and domination, corruption should be paired with harsh jail terms, disqualification from holding higher office, and a loss of property, assets and reputation. Only when this kind of operant conditioning is reinforced with complete consistency will we be trained to give up the belief that corruption is our right.