By Alec Hogg
My father-in-law, a sprightly 91 year old, got me back onto the right path last week. As tends to happen to those who follow South Africa’s depressing news cycle, I was feeling the fatigue of endless reports of politically instigated corruption. Perhaps we’d all be better off  just completely ignoring the politicians, I mused. Something you may have also considered.
Not so, this dyed-in-the-wool engineer instructed. It’s just a case of too many people expressing too many opinions. What the country needs is facts, he opined, because nothing is more powerful than the truth.
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So I went scurrying back to Google. And as often occurs when conviction is renewed, the universe aligned and pretty quickly I was reading an appropriate piece published by the Scientific American. It rekindled my enthusiasm for the Good Fight – and will surely do the same for anyone feeling overwhelmed by the current tsunami of bad news.
There are dozens of psychological, sociological and economic theories about how lawless societies are directly correlated with dishonesty among their citizens. But actually proving the link has eluded science. That is, until the publication a year ago of a comprehensive study by Nottingham University’s Simon Gachter and Jonathan Schulz of Yale.
Between 2011 and 2015, the duo conducted behavioural experiments with 2,658 students (mean age 21.7) in 23 countries. The students were given cash determined by the number they rolled on a dice. Only they got to see what number had actually been rolled and were given the freedom to report it as honestly as they liked.
The closer a national result was to the statistical mean, the more honest the group of students from that country. Gachter and Schulz compared what was submitted by the students with a PRV Index – “prevalence of rule violations” – for each country. They computed this PRV by using data measuring national political fraud, tax evasion and corruption.
Their empirical research proved, for the first time, what all rational beings would have expected. There was a direct correlation between the honesty of the citizens and their country’s PRV. Those from the most corrupt countries “rolled” significantly higher numbers on average than those from law abiding. There as a similar difference between collectivist societies, which were more corrupt than those promoting individualism.
The conclusion: “people benchmark their justifiable dishonesty with the extent of dishonesty they see in their societal environment.” SA was among 23 countries surveyed its PRV index mid-range, alongside Lithuania and Italy; more honest than Tanzania, Morocco, China, Columbia and Kenya; but behind rules-followers Austria, UK, Germany and Sweden.
The critical finding from this ground-breaking research was honesty in a society is dependent on “good institutions that limit cheating and rule violations – crucial for prosperity and development.” As strength of institutions gets eroded by plunderers, the economy’s prospects worsen. So if you didn’t already realise it, science now proves the self-serving greed of the Zuptoids has a knock on effect on the honesty of all South Africans, and the country’s GDP growth. Another reason why stakes in the Gordhan v Zuma battle are so high.
