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Bribery, a grand global challenge, often occurs across national jurisdictions. Behavioral research studying bribery to inform anticorruption interventions, however, has merely examined bribery within single nations. Here, we report online experiments and provide insights into crossnational bribery. We ran a pilot study (across three nations) and a large, incentivized experiment using a bribery game played across 18 nations ( N = 5,582, total number of incentivized decisions = 346,084). The results show that people offer disproportionally more bribes to interaction partners from nations with a high (vs. low) reputation for foreign bribery, measured by macrolevel indicators of corruption perceptions. People widely share nation-specific expectations about a nation’s bribery acceptance levels. However, these nation-specific expectations negatively correlate with actual bribe acceptance levels, suggesting shared yet inaccurate stereotypes about bribery tendencies. Moreover, the interaction partner’s national background (more than one’s own national background) drives people’s decision to offer or accept a bribe—a finding we label conditional bribery.

We respond to the comments (https://doi.org/10.5964/ps.9227) on our “Ten Steps” paper (https://doi.org/10.5964/ps.6029), focusing on the most prominent themes: (1) What motivates scientists?, (2) Consensus-building (Is our field ready? May there be adverse side-effects? How shall we do it?), (3) How may institutional change be facilitated?, (4) Diversity (of participants, stimuli, methodology, measures, and among researchers), (5) The reliability of our proposed scoring system, and (6) The real-world relevance of personality research. We stand by our call for more concerted consensus-building and offer a few clarifications in this regard. We also issue four specific calls to action to our colleagues in the field: (a) specify legitimate paths to greater consensus, (b) explicate what constitutes good “qualitative” research, (c) help establish a widely used, public domain item database, and (d) determine what the most important contemporary goals of personality research are.

In February 2020, the Personality and Diagnostics Chapter (DPPD) of the German Psychological Society (DGPs) tasked this group of authors with outlining what should be considered “good personality science”, as a positive vision of how to improve the credibility of research in the field. We argue in favor of working toward greater consensus about (1) shared, important research goals, (2) standardized use of terminology, (3) standardized measurement practices, (4) standardized ways of pre-processing and analyzing data, and (5) shared views of the current state of theory and knowledge. All of these should help streamline the field considerably. We also argue in favor of (6) theory formalization, (7) pre-registration requirements for any confirmatory claims, (8) valuing replication attempts more (e.g., by reserving a quota of journal space for them), (9) planning for informative (e.g., well-powered) studies, and (10) making data, code, and materials open to the public by default. The current, quantity-based incentive structures in academia clearly stand in the way of implementing many of these practices, resulting in a research literature with sometimes questionable utility and/or integrity. As a solution, we propose a quality-based reward scheme that explicitly weights published research by its good science merits. Adoption of such a reward scheme may incur a significant decline in overall publication numbers, hopefully resulting in (a) an improved signal-to-noise ratio in the literature, and (b) more efficient allocation of resources (e.g., time) by researchers, who would be enabled to read more of what is being published, and to review each other’s work more carefully. Scientists need to be increasingly rewarded for doing good work, not just lots of work.