Psychological, Behavioral, and Economic Perspectives on Corruption

With the development and transformation of China’s economy, “anti-corruption” has become the top priority of the Communist Party of China in recent years. Corruption is a kind of unethical behavior that the public power loss the public nature because of private using, it deviates from the value of public power and the goals of the value. Here, we review both experimental evidences documenting acts of small corruption and recent evolutionary cognitive models based on surveys of corruption. These studies show that corruption and the crime of corruption is a phased development process based on psychological development theory and game theory. This unethical behavior can be a crime by the unconscious cognitive processes begins with the simple reciprocity behavior to slip into large illegal acts or be a transition process by the subject of corruption from the initial compliance with corrupt group of standards or requirements to becoming unconscious acts of corruption or norm. These researches present different commentary and results, and sometimes even contradictory views.