About a third of Israelis are willing to cheat to earn money

A new study conducted at the University of Haifa together with international partners revealed that people who were asked to answer an answer from memory searched Google without permission to get money * Another finding: Israelis are indifferent to corruption

People who receive financial incentives tend to behave in a corrupt manner, according to a new study conducted at the University of Haifa, in collaboration with the University of Washington. "The research shows us that money corrupts. We offered our male and female participants only 50 NIS in exchange for them successfully completing a simple task, and we saw that close to a third chose to cheat in order to get the money," said doctoral student Moran Shachnik, one of the study's editors.

In a study published in the journal International Journal of Public Opinion Research, PhD student Moran Shachnik and Dr. Israel Wismal Menor from the School of Political Science, along with Prof. Patricia Moi from the University of Washington and Dr. Rico Newman from the Technical University of Berlin, asked to check whether a financial incentive would cause people to behave in an immoral way. About 400 participated in the study Subjects from Israel who were exposed to news flashes filmed in the studios here - the Israel Broadcasting Corporation, half of all The participants were exposed to a flash that included news about a corrupt mayor, and the other half to a news about a mayor who signed an agreement to establish Kiryat Hitech. After watching the flashes, they were asked to answer questions related to the flash, with half of them being promised a monetary reward of NIS 50 for each correct answer the questions The respondents were asked to answer all the questions from memory and not to use a search engine like Google to find the answers.

From the findings, it was found that about a third of the participants who were promised a prize cheated and went to Google to find the answers to the questionnaire, more than ten times more than those who were not promised a monetary prize. According to the researchers, the meaning of the finding is that a small financial incentive is enough to make certain people behave in an immoral way. It was also found that exposure to news coverage of corruption had no effect on the behavior of the viewers, contrary to the findings conducted in the past in various studies.

"It is possible that in Israel we are flooded with a lot of media coverage of corruption scandals, to the point that we are no longer influenced by news on the subject," the researchers said. "We plan to conduct a similar study in countries where citizens are not exposed every day to news about acts of corruption by their leaders, and after that we will also be able to compare the countries."

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