Corruption as a failure of cooperation

FREIDIN, E.

Berlín

Workshop; Summer Institute of Bounded Rationality; 2012

Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Broadly speaking, my research interests involve the use of evolutionary ideas and reasoning to clarify the proximate causes of behavior both in humans and nonhumans. My current research topics, widely conceived, belong to the area of studies of cooperation (and its failures). On one hand, I am studying reputation tracking in dogs. Dogs are an interesting species to study cooperative-related abilities, because, despite their phylogenetic distance to Homo sapiens, they have been living in human social environments for the last 10,000-30,000 years through which they have acquired impressive skills to successfully interact with humans. On the other hand, I am starting to study human corruption using laboratory experiments. Corruption could be seen as a failure of cooperation, in particular when the free rider issue occurs within an institutional framework. I am particularly interested in the moral heuristics that may be activated when people confront corruption-like scenarios.