What Your Honesty Depends on

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Why does a person act dishonestly, commit crimes? It is generally accepted that the whole point is in physiological deviations, childhood traumas, family upbringing and the negative influence of the environment. However, as scientists have found out, this is not entirely true …

Recently, scientists tried to find out in which countries the sense of justice is stronger in children. Several hundred children from 4 to 15 years old took part in it. The test regions were the United States, Canada, India, Mexico, Peru, Senegal, and Uganda. The experiment itself was very simple: the sweets were divided between the children so that some got more and some got less. But the results were unexpected. Of course, almost all children were worried if they received less candy, but only representatives of Canada, the United States and Uganda did not agree with the injustice towards others. And here's what's interesting: the subjects were aware of what was fair and what was not. It turns out that children are influenced not only by relatives and friends, but also by all their fellow citizens.

Another study shows that there is also a connection between adult behavior and where they live. a team of researchers from the University of East Anglia was tied to monetary rewards. At first, the participants were asked to guess what would come up: heads or tails, and then - to take part in a music quiz, and it was forbidden to search for information on the Internet. Small amounts of hard American currency were relied on for correct answers.

It turned out that dishonesty is characteristic of the inhabitants of all the countries participating in the experiment, and these are Brazil, China, Greece, Japan, Russia, Switzerland, Turkey, USA, Argentina, Denmark, Great Britain, India, Portugal, South Africa and South Korea. However, the connection between the country's “dishonesty” and the low level of incomes of its inhabitants turned out to be visible to the naked eye. The British were the most honest. Turks, Indians and Chinese showed the highest percentage of cheating.

Of course, you could say it's all about income. But here is the work of American and German psychologists in Nature, showing that the observance of ethical standards by each member of society depends primarily on the level of development of this society. 2,568 young people from 20 countries of the world, including Vietnam, China, Morocco, Great Britain, the Czech Republic, Italy, Spain, Sweden and many others, took part in the experiment with the use of the “coefficient of violations of the rules” (for some reason, Russia was bypassed, probably because of an unknown mentality). It turned out that the honesty of an individual is higher in those countries where the level of corruption is low, and the population does not evade paying taxes.

This seems to be a great excuse to emigrate to more prosperous countries. After all, what could be more important than our children? In a country with a low level of corruption, they will be able to get a better education and become better than us. True, one must take into account that newcomers are quite capable of changing the realities of even the most prosperous country with an honest and happy population. So maybe it's better to start changing yourself and the world around you?