On the hard problem of separating "normal" from "ok"
A while ago I was listening to a podcast on the challenges of democracy and dealing with corruption and it brought up an issue I've seen a lot in a number of other contexts. I thought I'd take a shot at summarizing all the different places I've seen this effect and some implications of it. Rather than paraphrase I'll just quote from the transcript: you design messages that tell people, and often this is what happens, there's a lot of corruption, the corruption is a big problem, the corruption being a problem is hurting our development, it's hurting the economy, it's hurting jobs. We need to fight corruption. It's time for you to stand up. What we found, which is consistent with previous studies that have been done in other parts of the world, is that the people who received the anti-corruption messages either had no effect, or they became more likely to pay the bribe in the game. This is actually a pretty typical example of a trap you can fall into ...