Does Winning an Election Increase Corruption?

Winning a competition contributes to subsequent unethical behavior, claims a paper in PNAS, based on a series of studies. Winners behave more dishonestly than competition losers.

The paper by Amos Schurra and Ilana Ritov from Israel provides evidence to show that winning a competition increases the likelihood of winners stealing money from their counterparts in a subsequent unrelated task. But the effect holds only when winning means performing better than others and not when success is determined by chance or in reference to a personal goal. The results also show that a possible mechanism underlying the effect is an enhanced sense of entitlement among competition winners.

Now I understand why, with each election, corruption grows.

PNAS 113  (7): 1754–1759 (2016)      doi/10.1073/pnas.1515102113