We The Trusting

Sandeep Gautam
12 November 2012, 05:31 PM IST

Chetan Bhagat wrote a blog post, We the Shameless, insinuating that the average Indian is morally bankrupt and that this is reflected in the high levels of institutional and political corruption rampant in India. His prescribed remedy is to look within and start with small acts like giving minimal wages/ a  6-day-week to domestic helps. By shaming the average Indian he hopes to bring about much-needed-change.

Shantanu Bhagwat, takes exception to this, and retorts that it's the institutions and processes around us that make us behave as we do. He points out that Indian s living abroad are law-abiding and honest citizens- the implicit assumption being that the average Indian living in India is dishonest/ corrupt- due to lack of incentives – whatever.

While I am neither as famous as Chetan, nor have as strong a fan following as Shantanu, I am all too familiar with such debates – in psychology for example the debate rages between whether its Nature or Nurture that drives behavior / character/ personality/any other trait.  The Nature - Nurture  version of above debate is that by nature (the values underlying Indian culture) Indians are corrupt and need to take a honest look at themselves and change themselves and their value systems; the nurture argument goes that the structures, processes, in effect the political environment, is such that it makes cheating monsters out of normal decent humans. If only, Indians lived abroad or in a different environment, they would have behaved differently.

Psychologists have solved this nature-nurture debate by agreeing that its nature via nurture or that both genes and environments have a strong, if not equal, effect. However, both modes of thinking are strongly deterministic. Given your nature (genes in psychology; Indian culture in our current case) this is how you are doomed to be for the rest of your life - or given your nurture (the early or current environmental effects) this is how you will behave, unless the environment itself changes (of course you can't turn back the clock and change the effects of early environment, so current behavior is only partly controllable).

Both ignore humans/society as having free will or choice and having the ability to rise above the limitations and constrictions placed by their genes/environments / cultural values/ structural incentives and processes.

Before I get carried away let me delineate what factors theorists have come up as leading to (perceived/actual) corruption in states. Not surprisingly, two orthogonal factors have been identified. One factor is conceived of as cultural values and the other as structural opportunities and constraints.

Under structural opportunities and constraints come factors such as higher levels of development, openness to trade, competitive markets (as opposed to monopolistic), democratic governance, political right and non-presidential/ non-federal forms of government – all associated with  lower levels of corruption.   

To measure cultural values is tricky, but there is a World Values Survey (WVS) that assesses different nation states/ cultures on two major high-level dimensions of values – one dimension ranges from having and believing in Traditional authority structures to Secular-rational authority structures; the other ranges from being driven by survival values or needs to self-expression needs and values.

As per one analysis, countries/ cultures low in secular-rational values are more likely to be politically corrupt; also those low in self-expression values will also be more corrupt, but each delta of being driven by survival values will have twice the effect of being driven by traditional values. They have even come up with a precise equation for this ( EI is elite integrity ratio and measures corruption – 10 means low corruption and 0 means high corruption, self-expression and secular-rational are zero mean value variables so where positive values indicate more self-expressive and secular modes )

EI = 0.85 (2 * Self-expression + Secular-rational) + 5        

Where does India stand? Self–expression values for India from latest WVS  (conducted in 2006) are -0.21 and Secular-rational score is -0.36; putting them into equation yields: EI= 4.337; from independent measures of EI the score for India was 2.8 and it ranked 54 out of 68 (in bottom 15). Somehow the cultural value equation is not making sense for India and we are politically more corrupt than indicated by our cultural values. What is going here? Perhaps the structural opportunities and constraints are to blame to a major extent.  

Before we leave this point, a few observations:

1. As countries develop they move from survival values to self-expression values- this has been the historical trend- also true for India.  In Developed countries where wealth is abundant less people are driven by survival values.
2. As countries became modern there was a trend towards secular-rational authority from traditional – again trend holds true for India too-  but as countires become post-modern the trend is toward s no authority at all.
3. India is currently in the center- equi- poised between secular-traditional and self-expressive-survival values.
4. It is thought that traditional values encourage nepotism etc and that is the major cause of corruption (think Vadera, as per Chetan) ; it's also thought that survival values, and income inequality which is related to it, lead to structural exploitations (think Gadkari, a s per Chetan).

Now comes the meat of my argument; the political corruption we see, is in spite of, rather than because of, the good trusting and trustworthy nature of Indians.

There are multiple lines of arguments: first it's important to differentiate political trust and corruption with social generalized interpersonal trust and values: the error Chetan makes is by conflating the two. The above analysis of Indian cultural values as assesses by WVS, clearly indicate that all things being equal, corruption index (EI) in India should have been around 4.337 (placing it at #30 out 0f 68 nations); all things are not equal and there are immense structural opportunities and constraints that  are causing rampant corruption in India. I would give Shantanu a +1 in this round of debate.

The error Shantanu makes is, implicitly admitting that political trust and perceived corruption correlates with/ speaks of the normal social trust/ corruption of average Indian. I would argue to the contrary that despite strong negative effects of political corruption on social trust and cooperation, we Indians are still a lot less corrupt/ untrustworthy when spoken of as a society.  

Again I'll let the data speak: first there is no denying the fact that we are a politically corrupt nation (we rank 95 amongst 182 nations on Corruption Perception Index and also ranked in bottom 15 out of nearly 70 countries when it came to elite integrity (EI) index).  However are we, the average Indians, also morally bankrupt/ untrustworthy?

According to the same WVS, India ranks as top  #15 amongst 80 countries listed, when it comes to social trust [pdf] – that is about 40 % of people in India agree that other people can be trusted as compared to highest ~ 65 % in Denmark and lowest ~ 3 % in Brazil.  Thus, most people in India trust each other. You may say what it has to do with trustworthiness or actual Good Samaritan acts. Be aware that perceptions of trust level are highly correlated with actual acts [pdf] that restore faith in people- in one experiment wallets stuffed with money and addresses are lefty and its tracked how many of them are returned- the percentage of wallets returned correlates with perception of people about trust level in society.  

Thus, if political corruption continues to triumph in India, it's not because of, but despite our good natures. Perhaps we trust each other too much and that trust percolates when it comes to believing in our leaders. Let's hope that when we have to shame- we shame the right people- We, the trusting are not to be shamed, but we, the leaders, who take, we, the trusting on a ride, are rightly to be.  

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