Tidigare forskning har visat att den kultur människor har vuxit upp i sätter prägel på deras beteende:

We find that the number of diplomatic parking violations is strongly correlated with existing measures of home country corruption. This finding suggests that cultural or social norms related to corruption are quite persistent: even when stationed thousands of miles away, diplomats behave in a manner highly reminiscent of government officials in the home country. Norms related to corruption are apparently deeply ingrained, and factors other than legal enforcement are important determinants of corruption behavior.

Samtidigt visar den experimentella litteraturen att intelligens är positivt relaterad till prosocialt beteende. Den nya studien ”Human Capital in the Creation of Social Capital: Evidence from Diplomatic Parking Tickets” undersöker mot denna bakgrund om genomsnittlig intelligens och utbildning är relaterad till omfattningen av korruption i olika länder och till diplometernas laglydnad utomlands:

We demonstrate two facts in this paper: First, that national average IQ and education levels predict home country corruption, consistent with the view that human capital creates social capital, and second, that national average IQ and education predict unpaid diplomatic parking tickets even when we control for the diplomat’s home-country corruption and GDP per capita. … It appears that intelligence is a form of social intelligence, and that education helps create social capital. Contrary to what one might expect from simple versions of the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis (inter alia, Byrne (1996)), diplomats from more intelligent, better educated nations do not attempt to exploit the rules to the maximum extent possible. Instead, they are more likely to cooperate with the local norms, to ”go along to get along.” The negative relationship between human capital and diplomatic parking tickets fits in better with hypothesis that human capital is typically used for cooperation, not exploitation (inter alia, Moll and Tomasello (2007). For those familiar with the experimental literature on intelligence and prosocial cooperation, our results should be unsurprising.

Forskarna tror att genomsnittlig IQ och utbildningsnivå kan bidra till att förklara hur företrädare för olika länder beter sig i internationella förhandlingar och i vilken mån de följer ingångna avtal. Det vore en intressant sak att utforska vidare. I vilket fall finner jag det fascinerande att kognitiv förmåga och samarbetsvilja är relaterade.