A new study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research says students who cheat on simple tasks are more likely to want government jobs. The study, “Dishonesty and Selection into Public Service,” led by students from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, included hundreds of student-participants in Bangalore, India.
The study suggests that one of the contributing forces behind government corruption could be who gets into government work in the first place, reports the Los Angeles Times.
“Overall, we find that dishonest individuals . . . prefer to enter government service,” wrote the authors of the study, Rema Hanna and Shing-Yi Wang. “If people have the view that jobs in government are corrupt, people who are honest might not want to get into that system,” they added.
Source: Los Angeles Times.