The cost of saying no: behavioural, physiological, motor, and agency-related responses to corruption under threat in immersive virtual reality
Abstract
Corruption can involve not only incentives to comply, but also personal costs for refusing. This combination of reward and threat is especially relevant in forms of coercive corruption, including organised-crime contexts in which bribery and intimidation may operate together. To investigate the psychological processes underlying these decisions, we developed an immersive virtual reality (IVR) economic game in which participants acted as public officials responsible for awarding government contracts. Virtual agents repeatedly offered bribes in exchange for preferential treatment. Accepting a bribe benefited the participant financially but imposed either a monetary loss or a mild electric shock on a third party. In some trials, refusing the bribe also exposed participants to the risk of receiving a mild electric shock themselves, allowing us to experimentally manipulate the personal cost of refusal. We examined how threat and the type of negative externality influenced corrupt decisions, autonomic arousal, motor conflict, and sense of agency. Participants were more likely to accept bribes under threat, and acceptance was also more likely when the consequence for the third party was monetary rather than physical. Threat increased skin conductance responses, particularly when participants refused, and delayed movement initiation, suggesting that coercive pressure affected both anticipatory arousal and action preparation. Measures of sense of agency showed a more complex pattern than predicted, with no evidence that threat produced the reduction in agency typically observed in direct-coercion paradigms. Together, these findings show that IVR can be used to study coercive corruption in an ecologically richer but experimentally controlled setting, while also capturing behavioural, physiological, motor, and agency-related processes that unfold during corrupt decision-making.
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BibTeX
@misc{vabba2026cost,
title = {{The cost of saying no: behavioural, physiological, motor, and agency-related responses to corruption under threat in immersive virtual reality}},
author = {Alisha Vabba and Matteo P Lisi and Salvatore Maria Aglioti},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/9pbmw_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/9pbmw_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The cost of saying no: behavioural, physiological, motor, and agency-related responses to corruption under threat in immersive virtual reality
AU - Alisha Vabba
AU - Matteo P Lisi
AU - Salvatore Maria Aglioti
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/09
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/9pbmw_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/9pbmw_v1/
AB - Corruption can involve not only incentives to comply, but also personal costs for refusing. This combination of reward and threat is especially relevant in forms of coercive corruption, including organised-crime contexts in which bribery and intimidation may operate together. To investigate the psychological processes underlying these decisions, we developed an immersive virtual reality (IVR) economic game in which participants acted as public officials responsible for awarding government contracts. Virtual agents repeatedly offered bribes in exchange for preferential treatment. Accepting a bribe benefited the participant financially but imposed either a monetary loss or a mild electric shock on a third party. In some trials, refusing the bribe also exposed participants to the risk of receiving a mild electric shock themselves, allowing us to experimentally manipulate the personal cost of refusal. We examined how threat and the type of negative externality influenced corrupt decisions, autonomic arousal, motor conflict, and sense of agency. Participants were more likely to accept bribes under threat, and acceptance was also more likely when the consequence for the third party was monetary rather than physical. Threat increased skin conductance responses, particularly when participants refused, and delayed movement initiation, suggesting that coercive pressure affected both anticipatory arousal and action preparation. Measures of sense of agency showed a more complex pattern than predicted, with no evidence that threat produced the reduction in agency typically observed in direct-coercion paradigms. Together, these findings show that IVR can be used to study coercive corruption in an ecologically richer but experimentally controlled setting, while also capturing behavioural, physiological, motor, and agency-related processes that unfold during corrupt decision-making.
ER -