Prescriptive moral concepts and descriptive beliefs that people construct about social reality interact in moral judgments about complex social phenomena such as corruption. The aim of the present study was to analyze how certain socio-cultural beliefs about lawlessness, institutional illegitimacy, and survival in the Colombian context, lead towards more positive and tolerant evaluations about everyday bribery and nepotism. Ninety-six participants from 6th grade (age M = 11.9 years), 11th grade

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... (age M = 16.6 years), and college students (age M = 20.5 years), from 4 public and private institutions were asked to make moral and tolerance evaluations of corruption acts in an abstract baseline without contextual information, and in three contexts which included socio-cultural beliefs about lawlessness, illegitimacy, and survival (through open-ended questions and continuous scales of severity and acceptability). Although the majority of participants judged the transgressions in their abstract version negatively, based on prescriptive reasons, when framed in the contexts, the same situations led to significantly more positive and tolerant judgments based on descriptive reasons. The kind of contingencies that each context produced and their implications for political culture and moral judgments about corruption are discussed.