Corruption is not just something done by ‘them’; it is something systems can quietly teach almost anyone, including people we love
They say one should not speak ill of the dead. But memory has its own ethics, and sometimes the truth sits quietly inside nostalgia. My late uncle used to take us on long drives across Punjab—Gujrat, Sialkot, parts of Faisalabad, and Lahore.
We were children, so the journeys felt like adventures. At every stop, factory managers welcomed him warmly. We left with boxes of shoes, crockery sets, and sometimes bundles of clothing. To us, it felt like generosity. We thought he was important, respected, and loved.
Years later, studying environmental governance, the memory rearranged itself into something darker. Those gifts were not kindness. They were payments. My uncle, a senior government officer, was helping factories avoid compliance.
The gifts were cheaper than installing filters, managing waste, or reducing emissions. I still struggle with this memory because he was not a cartoon villain. He was affectionate, funny, and devoted to family. Which raises a question that sits at the heart of Pakistan’s corruption debate: is corruption about bad individuals, or about systems that quietly recruit ordinary people into unethical behaviour?
The recently launched Index of Transparency and Accountability in Pakistan (iTAP), developed by Ipsos with Pakistani institutional partners, is interesting precisely because it complicates the usual narrative. The most striking pattern is the perception–lived experience gap.
A large majority of Pakistanis believe corruption is widespread in public institutions. Yet significantly fewer report direct personal experience with bribery, nepotism, or illicit enrichment. That gap matters psychologically. When people believe corruption is everywhere, it changes behaviour even if their own experience does not fully confirm it.
Behavioural science calls this pluralistic misperception: individuals overestimate how common undesirable behaviour is. If I believe everyone pays bribes, refusing to do so feels naïve rather than ethical. The system becomes self-fulfilling.
Corruption spreads not only because of incentives or weak enforcement, but also because of perceived social norms. In experiments globally, people are more likely to cheat when they think others are cheating. Morality, it turns out, is partly a group behaviour.
The real tragedy of corrupt systems is not just the theft of money or environmental damage. It is moral drift and the slow movement of ordinary people away from values they would otherwise hold
iTAP also suggests something counterintuitive: where systems reduce discretion and increase predictability, especially through digitalisation, public satisfaction rises, and perceived corruption falls. This is classic behavioural design.
When systems rely less on personal interaction, they reduce opportunities for moral negotiation. Face-to-face exchanges create psychological space for favours, sympathy, pressure, and reciprocity. Automated systems remove that emotional layer. They make corruption harder, not just logistically, but socially.
Another key insight from the findings is trust asymmetry. People distrust institutions broadly, even when their personal encounters are neutral or positive. This suggests corruption in Pakistan functions as a narrative environment as much as a lived one.
Narratives matter because they shape expectations. If citizens approach every government interaction assuming extraction or harassment, they behave defensively. Officials, sensing distrust, may become more transactional. This creates what psychologists call a hostile attribution loop. Both sides interpret each other as adversarial actors.
Corruption is rarely about purely immoral individuals. Most people see themselves as decent. Instead, corruption often emerges from moral rationalisation. People tell themselves stories: everyone does this; salaries are low; the system is unfair anyway; this helps my family; this is just a gift, not a bribe. My uncle likely had such stories. Most corrupt systems run not on monsters, but on narratives that make wrongdoing feel ordinary.
State structure, however, still matters enormously. Behavioural tendencies are universal. What differs is the environment that activates them. Where monitoring is weak, processes are opaque, and discretion is high, corruption becomes easier to justify. Where rules are simple, enforcement is visible, and consequences are predictable, ethical behaviour becomes the default rather than the heroic choice. In other words, states don’t eliminate human weakness. They design around it.
iTAP indirectly reinforces a crucial policy lesson: anti-corruption campaigns focused purely on morality messaging rarely work. Shame-based messaging assumes people are consciously choosing evil.
Human behaviour suggests that many people drift into corruption gradually, through normalisation and situational pressure. The more effective approach is friction design. Make corruption slower, riskier, more traceable, and socially awkward.
Another subtle implication of the survey is generational. Younger populations, exposed to digital service delivery and global transparency norms, may tolerate corruption less as an inevitable fact of life. But if institutional reform stalls, disillusionment can deepen into cynicism, which is actually worse. Cynicism stabilises corruption by convincing people that reform is impossible.
So, is corruption individual or systemic?
Behaviourally, it is both—but sequentially. Systems shape norms. Norms shape individual behaviour. Then individual behaviour reinforces systems. Breaking the cycle requires intervention at the system level first, because individuals rarely defect from group norms without protection.
When I think about my uncle now, I don’t excuse what he did. But I understand how someone like him could exist inside a structure where corruption felt routine, low-risk, and socially tolerated. The real tragedy of corrupt systems is not just the theft of money or environmental damage. It is moral drift and the slow movement of ordinary people away from values they would otherwise hold.
Pakistan’s corruption challenge is not simply about catching bad actors. It is about redesigning environments so that the easiest, safest, most normal choice is the honest one.
And perhaps that is the most uncomfortable truth. Corruption is not just something done by “them.” It is something systems can quietly teach almost anyone, including people we love.
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