This project aims to understand one of the reasons why corruption persists, namely by studying the role of personal moral values and contextual values. Through experimental research, this study will assess how the moral characteristics of a given context can interact with people's personal values in preventing or facilitating corruption. To this end, this study will use Situational Action Theory (SAT) as its theoretical framework, which was originally developed as a theory to understand how crime occurs as a consequence of person-environment interaction (Wikström, 2017). This study uses a factorial survey applied to a sample of people living in Portugal (N = 838), in which participants are randomly assigned to one of four hypothetical scenarios in a 2x2 design, i.e., varying in two dimensions and two levels: the moral values and the deterrence risk of the setting. Each participant reads only one of the four scenarios to minimise the risk of perceiving the manipulations (Wikström et al., 2012).

Understanding why corruption persists has been the focus of academic attention, and a large number of correlates of corruption have been studied. However, previous approaches have not focused on individual differences, interactions between the person and the setting, and the mental processes that move individuals to act corruptly. To overcome this, some authors suggest applying SAT to corruption, which is ultimately a direct result of individual behaviours and decisions. Adopting this approach complements previous research by considering corruption as a moral transgression arising from interactions between the person and the environment, rather than just selfish behaviour or a result of culture.