Here is an excerpt from the book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, by Robert M. Sapolsky. It's about the link between lying for monetary gain and corruption.
"The human capacity for deception is enormous. We have the most complex innervation of facial muscles and use massive numbers of motor neurons to control them— no other species can be poker- faced. And we have language, that extraordinary means of manipulating the distance between a message and its meaning. Humans also excel at lying because our cognitive skills allow us to do something beyond the means of any perfidious gelada baboon— we can finesse the truth. A cool study shows our propensity for this. To simplify: A subject would roll a die, with different results yielding different monetary rewards. The rolls were made in private, with the subject reporting the outcome— an opportunity to cheat. Given chance and enough rolls, if everyone was honest, each number would be reported about one sixth of the time. If everyone always lied for maximal gain, all rolls would supposedly have produced the highest paying number. There was lots of lying. Subjects were over 2,500 college students from twenty- three countries, and higher rates of corruption, tax evasion, and political fraud in a subject’s country predicted higher rates of lying. This is no surprise, after chapter 9’ s demonstration that high rates of rule violations in a community decrease social capital, which then fuels individual antisocial behavior. What was most interesting was that across all the cultures, lying was of a particular type. Subjects actually rolled a die twice, and only the first roll counted (the second, they were told, tested whether the die was “working properly”). The lying showed a pattern that, based on prior work, could be explained by only one thing— people rarely made up a high- paying number. Instead they simply reported the higher roll of the two. You can practically hear the rationalizing. “Darn, my first roll was a 1 [a bad outcome], my second a 4 [better]. Hey, rolls are random; it could just as readily have been 4 as a 1, so… let’s just say I rolled a 4. That’s not really cheating.” In other words, lying most often included rationalizing that made it feel less dishonest— not going whole hog for that filthy lucre, so that your actions feel like only slightly malodorous untruthiness."
"The human capacity for deception is enormous. We have the most complex innervation of facial muscles and use massive numbers of motor neurons to control them— no other species can be poker- faced. And we have language, that extraordinary means of manipulating the distance between a message and its meaning. Humans also excel at lying because our cognitive skills allow us to do something beyond the means of any perfidious gelada baboon— we can finesse the truth. A cool study shows our propensity for this. To simplify: A subject would roll a die, with different results yielding different monetary rewards. The rolls were made in private, with the subject reporting the outcome— an opportunity to cheat. Given chance and enough rolls, if everyone was honest, each number would be reported about one sixth of the time. If everyone always lied for maximal gain, all rolls would supposedly have produced the highest paying number. There was lots of lying. Subjects were over 2,500 college students from twenty- three countries, and higher rates of corruption, tax evasion, and political fraud in a subject’s country predicted higher rates of lying. This is no surprise, after chapter 9’ s demonstration that high rates of rule violations in a community decrease social capital, which then fuels individual antisocial behavior. What was most interesting was that across all the cultures, lying was of a particular type. Subjects actually rolled a die twice, and only the first roll counted (the second, they were told, tested whether the die was “working properly”). The lying showed a pattern that, based on prior work, could be explained by only one thing— people rarely made up a high- paying number. Instead they simply reported the higher roll of the two. You can practically hear the rationalizing. “Darn, my first roll was a 1 [a bad outcome], my second a 4 [better]. Hey, rolls are random; it could just as readily have been 4 as a 1, so… let’s just say I rolled a 4. That’s not really cheating.” In other words, lying most often included rationalizing that made it feel less dishonest— not going whole hog for that filthy lucre, so that your actions feel like only slightly malodorous untruthiness."