The opposite can happen too. Scott Alexander's old post "In favour of niceness, community and civilisation" quotes an Atlantic article [1] for an example of a m

The opposite can happen too. Scott Alexander's old post "In favour of niceness, community and civilisation" quotes an Atlantic article [1] for an example of a model where all of a country's officials can flip from mostly-corrupt to honest at short notice, once corruption falls below a threshold. A lot of other threshold situations like the one you described feature in that article too - including, sadly, a "Rwanda" model for how when inter-group animosity crosses a threshold you can end up with genocide. As far as I can tell, the formal name is "population dynamics". [1] https://archive.is/BXq66 https://archive.is/BXq66