My newest research on transparency and corruption
... and why transparency can be morally and politically corrupting
I have a new research paper that just came out arguing that in many ways, transparency results in moral and political corruption in that people often act in ways differently when watched or observed than they would in private. This often results in people creating reasons to publicly justify themselves to others, while hiding their true reasons; or, internalizing the reasons they generated for public consumption, thereby sacrificing their moral identity, and the coherence of their agency and mental lives. Here is the link.
This is the abstract,
It is widely held that transparency incentivizes good behavior. Though that may be, sometimes, there are tradeoffs here: transparency incentivizes people to conceal genuine reasons for action and instead manufacture insincere reasons for public consumption. The evidence for this comes from moral psychology and economics: when people are observed, they acquire an incentive to make more deontological and intuitive moral judgments than they would otherwise. In contrast, transparency incentivizes politicians and leaders to make more consequentialist and calculated moral judgments than they would otherwise. Transparency incentivizes people to foster distinct (inauthentic) moral identities—one personal and one public—or to make moral judgments based on reputational reasons that sometimes diverge from the moral facts. In either case, transparency can be morally and politically corrupting.