Situational Support for Corruption: A Two-Part Field Experiment on Collusive vs. Extortive Bribery.

This article reports on a two-part field experiment conducted with 1,403 residents of Nairobi County, Kenya, examining public attitudes toward collusive corruption and the effectiveness of negative externality primes—messages highlighting harm to others—in reducing participation in corruption. The study finds that collusive bribes, where citizens and officials mutually benefit by circumventing consequences of citizens' own mistakes, are judged more acceptable than extortion bribes but are simultaneously viewed as highly unethical and damaging to public institutions. The negative externality prime effectively reduces willingness to engage in corrupt collusion primarily among individuals who already reject the trade-off between private benefits and public harm, while those tolerant of corruption remain largely unaffected. These findings suggest that anticorruption messaging emphasizing harm to others may have limited impact on corruption-tolerant individuals and highlight the need for tailored interventions that consider heterogeneous public attitudes toward corruption.