The Influence Of Guanxi On Individual Bribery Decision

Bribery has an important influence on political,economic and cultural.Predecessors have already studied the factors influencing bribery and psychological mechanism of bribery from economical and moral level.But they ignored another important-factor-Guanxi.As a part of social networks,individuals are characterized with sociality from birth.Especially in Chinese and East Asian culture,Guanxi is an important social phenomenon and has a significant impact on daily life.How does Guanxi,especially under Chinese cultural context,affect bribery decisions?What is the psychological mechanism under these decisions?There are a few empirical researches on this issue.What are the differences in individual bribery decisions,when relatives,friends and strangers come to bribe directly?Further,what are the differences in individual bribery decisions,when strangers come to bribe going through their relatives and friends indirectly?To answer these questions,4 experiments were conducted.Pre-experiment determined the effective paradigm of bribery decision using different frameworks of the game paradigm,and validated the basic influencing factors of bribery decision.Experiment 1 was carried out on students and non-official social people to explore the impact of direct Guanxi on individual bribery decision and found that bribery decision-making of non-official individual was affected by direct Guanxi,risk and amount.Under such circumstance,the closer the direct Guanxi was,the lower the risk was and the greater the amount was,the greater the probability of bribery was.The direct Guanxi effect was also moderated by risk in which the greater the risk was,the weaker the direct Guanxi effect was but the pattern changed in which at low-risk,family and friends were classified as the same group and their bribes were given priority to accepting;but at high risk,friends and unfamiliar were classified as the same group,non-officials only give priority to family’s bribes.The direct Guanxi effect was also moderated by amount in which the greater the amount was,the weaker the direct Guanxi effect was.For non-officials,their decisions were not affected by amount when accepting bribes from family and friends,but affected when accepting bribes from strangers.Experiment 2 was done on officers and the results of Experiment 1 were repeated basically.Experiment 3 was carried out on students and non-official social people to explore the impact of indirect Guanxi on individual bribery decision from the point of view named "zou Guanxi" and found that the results of the indirect Guanxi were similar to those of the direct Guanxi.The indirect Guanxi effect was also moderated by risk in which the greater the risk was,the weaker the indirect Guanxi effect was but the pattern changed in which at low risk,non-officials treated people in three types of indirect Guanxi differently according to the closeness and gave priority to accepting the family’s bribes;but at high risk,they reduced bribes from any people with indirect relationship with them.Experiment 4 was done on officers and the results of Experiment 3 were repeated basically.Taken together,Guanxi is an important factor which can directly and also with risk and amount mutual interaction affect the bribery decision.The previous economic perspective and moral perspective cannot explain how the Guanxi affect bribery decisions.The Guanxi mechanism may be a new basic mechanism that has not been paid attention to in the study of corruption which has great theoretical significance for the construction of corruption model and also provides strong recommendations and practical guidance for the current social anti-corruption.