This thread has had a huge influx of comments from new accounts in the last 24 hours—over 250 and counting. They are all, I think, critical of the study. Many have been unsubstantive, but many have had interesting things to say.
Normally we'd consider closing the thread in a case like this, to prevent it from being brigaded. But this is an unusual case and I'm curious to see how far it goes.
In case any of the new commenters happens to read this: I'm the lead moderator of Hacker News. Would you mind sharing with us how you found out about this discussion? It's unusual for us to see so much activity in a thread that is already several days old, and I'm curious to find out what happened.
I mostly click on HN articles via Facebook, but I don't actively engage in discussions. I also happen to come across a lot of discussion on Chinese social media, like zhihu.
The news has been trending on Chinese sites for days, and when it's something as sensational as "China ranked lowest in global HONESTY study", people started to ask why, many went ahead and read the paper, found potential flaws in the design of the study, and wanted their questions answered. And when valid questions are not yet being addressed, many start to question the motivation behind this paper; the motivation of using labels like "honesty", that clearly has moral implications; the motivation behind Science publishing it, etc. Did the author exclude Japan because the result differed drastically from what was expected? Did the author include China because the result conveniently confirms the stereotypes? Are there any ethical concerns for such studies? After all, this seems to be a study about how likely it is for hotel staff to email the owner of the lost wallet in different countries, but it is being phrased into something much bigger.
Not saying those are real motivations of the paper, just emotions and speculation running wild in Chinese forums, then people get a bit angry, because they feel it's unjust, and they want to look for ways to communicate outside of Chinese social media.
Anyways, thanks for still keeping the discussion open. Most just want to have their voice heard, as they feel very, very strongly about it. And a possible explanation of commenting in Chinese is to force native English speakers to look up the translation, some sort of reference to how the study is conducted in English, even in China.
Because this topic is becoming one of the hottest topic in Chinese ask and answer platform “zhihu”. I realized some answers mentioned this website because one of the authors in paper answers some questions. The answers from the author of the paper enraged us，because his explainnation was ridiculous and full of prejudice. As a email unfriendly country, even though Chinese may have email address, it doesn’t mean we want to use it in normal life. Besides, as far as I know, most people work in recipotions do not even have a email from the work place. Another answer is about japan， it is even more ridiculous. China and japan share a similar culture, the authors exclude japan because they found people will give the wallet to police booth. In china we usually give the wallet to lost and found box. I do not see the difference between police office and the box at all. Those are the main questions Chinese want to ask, and we need a answer. Sorry for leaving so many similar comments below this topic, but we want a reasonable answer.
I do hope people calm down. At least write in English. For me I googled the title after I saw the paper from Science online during weekend. I have one major question: why does failing to send email equal to civic dishonest behavior. How the alternative explanation 'passive waiting strategy' is taken into account in their experiment or is it counted as part of civic dishonesty? I found here the author having fair discussions and being active. Then I started my post. Unfortunately I guess after so many opinions being expressed, some of which with strong emotions, it is too overwhelming for the author of the paper to reply.
Hi, I came across this site because I read an article on WeChat, the most commonly used social media in China, that directed me into this website. I believe most of the comments by newly registered Chinese users would be the same.
1. Contact information should not be just an email address. It’s better to have email, phone and any locally popular communication channels. In countries such as China, people don’t use email as often as apps like wechat. Desk clerks are less likely to register an email address to return a wallet, especially when it doesn’t have anything valuable inside.
2. The difference between money and no-money percentage may be a better indicator of civil honesty. The absolute percentage reflects more about a “I’ll wait for someone to come” or “not my business” attitude of desk clerks.
3. It is better to put something important to the owner but not everyone else in the wallet, such as a driver license or national ID card. This could reduce “not my business” factor.
1. This is a fair point. In the Supplemental Material, we explore cross-country differences in email usage. When we statistically adjust for country-level differences in email usage (using World Bank data), the country ranking remains essentially the same (adjusted rankings correlate over 0.90 with non-adjusted rankings). Also, when you restrict the data only to drop-offs performed at hotels -- which tend to rely on email more than other settings -- you see the same pattern of results.
2. Also a good point. However, there are mechanical problems with using the marginal differences between conditions -- for example, countries with high reporting rates in the NoMoney condition will be naturally capped in the possible size of the treatment treatment effect, compared to those with low reporting rates. Because the scale is bounded at 0 and 100% you're also fighting against reversion to the mean at the low and high ends of the distribution. FWIW we find that absolute levels of reporting rates correlate very highly with other known proxies of honesty both within and between countries (measures like tax evasion, corruption, etc), whereas relative differences between conditions do not.
3. We explicitly test this by randomly varying whether the wallets contained a key or not (valuable to the owner but not the recipient), while holding the rest of the contents in the wallet constant.
First point is really important. I can give email addresses to 100 people in India and ask them to message an important medical information (something of high value to recipient and no value to this person, at negligible effort) and the conversion would be quite low. Email for unacquainted users is perceived to be hard. Large part of India and other developing countries became digital without going through the internet of 90s and early 2000s. So email is foreign to large mass of people.
Great point about email. Speaking from experience, lots of people in India simply don't know how to send email.
For example my MIL is a medical doctor, so is obviously educated, speaks English well and uses a smart phone but wouldn't be able to send email to a new contact. Same with WhatsApp, she can reply to messages from us but I don't think she knows how to add a new contact to her phone.
We originally planned to include Japan but after some initial pilot testing we realized that the country was unsuitable for methodological reasons. Japan has a lot of small “police booths” where people can return lost objects. During our pilot tests, we found that Japanese citizens would not contact the owner but instead drop them off at a nearby police booth. This feature made it virtually impossible for us to assign individual wallets to particular drop-off locations.
This article examines the lost property regime of Japan, which has one of the most impressive reputations in the world for returning lost property to its rightful owner, and compares it with that of the United States. Folk legend attributes Japanese lost‐and‐found success to honesty and other‐regarding preferences. In this article, I focus on another possible explanation: legal institutions that efficiently and predictably allocate and enforce possessory rights. These recognized, centuries‐old rules mesh with norms, institutional structures, and economic incentives to reinforce mutually the message that each sends and yields more lost‐property recovery than altruism alone.
To carry out the experiment, the presenter and his daughter visited the Tokyo Skytree’s Sola Machi entertainment complex’s food court and left a smartphone, purse, and shopping bag full of recently purchased items on table for two. Then they positioned themselves at another table and surreptitiously filmed what happened.
A solid hour passed, with no one at all disturbing their unprotected belongings. As a matter of fact, while at the food court they saw a number of other people also stake out tables using bags, purses, and even baby strollers, which, being wheeled, are particularly easy to run off with. Eventually, the presenter decided to retrieve his possessions, not because he was worried that someone would steal them, but because he thought the cleaning staff might think they’d been forgotten and take them to the lost-and-found.
This remarkable trustworthiness wasn’t a fluke, either. Next, the presenter and his daughter made their way to a Starbucks branch where he decided to leave even more tempting bait: his MacBook Pro.
He even placed the laptop, all by itself, on a table behind where he was seated…but 25 minutes later, it was still there, and the presenter decided to call it a wrap.
Amazing.
What's also amazing is that there seems to be a very common belief that when people move to another country, they entirely adopt the culture of that country. So, if Japanese people immigrate to a country where leaving your Macbook unattended in a coffee shop will result in it being stolen, it is expected that their theft statistics will rise to resemble that of the host country. I wonder how true this belief is.
To me, the biggest confounding variable is the race/culture of the researchers. From the supplementary material:
"We recruited eleven male and two female research assistants to perform the drop-offs. All research assistants were recruited from two German speaking universities and
born between 1985 and 1993." Seems somewhat fortuitous that German/Nordic countries uniformly performed the best. In many countries, they would stick out like a sore thumb. To make this study more complete, they really should have someone who looks and speaks more native do this as well. Especially as race/culture seems to be so highly correlated with the result, it is only natural to see whether factors like distrust/xenophobia play a part. I mean, some random stranger (possibly using a language translator app!?) tells you to do something with a package they drop off and then leaves very quickly. How I react would certainly depend at least somewhat on my impression of the person and how that brief interaction went.
Definitely a fair criticism. In the paper we test for experimenter effects (are the results different for male vs female research assistants? Are some researcher assistants acting differently in a way that might bias the results?) and do not find any meaningful differences. But this doesn't get to your broader point about the homogeneity of our research assistants (all are undergrads from Western Europe, etc).
My sense is that our results probably serve as a lower bound on reporting rates -- if the person who dropped off the wallet comes across as a local, reporting rates would be higher. But this is pure speculation.
Such an interesting study. Over the past few years, I encounter daily cynicism about how ‘people are the worst’. But, it is so important to not lose this basic trust in others because that, in fact, is the only true foundation in life. We are all alone in this world and to lose trust in the one, absolutely critical and positive tenet of human life is despairing. People are generally good and even, when they are not, it is all explainable.
The wallet in the experiment is doesn't look like a normal "wallet" at all - it's a business card case. I wonder if the results would be any different if they used a real wallet.
Absolutely. We thought a lot about this trade-off when designing the study.
The disadvantage of using a clear business-card case over a traditional wallet is clear, in that it is relatively unusual. The advantage of using a clear case, however, is that it affords considerably more experimental control in that you can be relatively certain that every recipient knows what is inside. With a wallet, there will be variation in who decides to inspect the wallet, and that introduces selection effects into the experimental design (i.e., are those who are willing to look inside a wallet, compared to those who don't, different in their degree of honesty?). This makes interpreting the evidence a lot more challenging.
FWIW we examined how our measure of civic honesty compares to other known proxies of honest behavior (tax evasion, corruption, etc) within and between countries. If there was something artificial or unique about our setting -- such as using unusual clear business card cases -- then you wouldn't expect our results to generalize or correlate with other measures of honest behavior. However, we find response rates correlate very highly with these other proxies of honesty, suggesting that they are tapping into some broader construct.
That doesn’t look like any wallet I’ve ever seen. Did it really have to be clear and look like a plastic envelope? Maybe not enough random people would pick it up if it was a real dark wallet (vs say a staff member who cleans the place)?
It’s always good to question how the experiment reflects real life if we’re going to use it to influence real life policy and business decisions. But it’s possible this still sufficiently measured people’s honesty since the basic idea is the same (returning found property of value).
The other factor is the job title. Wouldn’t a “Software Engineer” be less likely to seem in need rather than the average (ie, working class) job title? Given a large enough pool I’m sure this could influence how people factored in the effort of finding the person vs feel-good emotional (or moral, ideological, etc) reward of doing good.
Basically: if the amount of the money mattered, then wouldn’t the job title of this new person whom you only know has business cards and a good job?
So, nice study, but two things:
1) it may be that when there is no money in it, the finder thinks "by the time we get it back to them, they will have replace their ID and called their credit card companies to cancel their credit cards and issue new ones, so it doesn't really matter". When there is money, it is more likely to actually matter.
2) It may be that the expected consequences of keeping it seem negligible when there is no money, but if you kept it and got found out, when there IS money, then you could be in trouble
3) What is Mexico's deal? The only nation which went the opposite way. Or, perhaps, what happened with the data entry in Mexico that they got the numbers reversed?
1) Interesting when you conclude 'dishonesty'with no contacting received. A second explanation would be that people put it to lost and found box or culturally/occupationally have the practice waiting instead of searching for the owner. For Japan you realized that and excluded it. For other countries, the way to deal with unattended belongings might not be as black and white as in Japan but certainly varies. I could also interpret the data as measuring active searching vs passive waiting strategies across countries.
2) I feel dishonesty is a too big word and this title/claim goes too far. I think it more reflects the sense of responsibility of the employees at this particular job. 'Not my business' is different from being dishonest.
The workload, the degree of satisfaction towards the job and even how natural to communicate in English/via email will largely affect whether an employee would send out that email, which isn't part of their duty in their understanding. They might just leave it there at the counter. Again, I won't call that person being dishonest.
3) The nonusual looking of the wallet and the whole act might be more perceived as a spam or fishing for info in certain regions. In deed, when I moved to one big city in the US, I became less willing to reply to missing phone calls compared to a rather spam-free top city of a different country. Your subjects in certain countries might just be very alert to your behavior.
Very nice and unintuitive main finding. I wish there was a separate condition where they sent a second experimenter back to the location of the hand-in to ask for the wallet. Just waiting for a contact leaves some room for unpredictable effects: perhaps with no money, the person can't even be bothered to deal with it. With money, there is an incentive to try to contact in the hope that if no response is received within a short period, the money can be kept.
Thanks for your comments (I'm one of the authors on this paper). For a subset of the countries, we went back to retrieve the wallets (logistically, collecting the wallets turned out to be extremely difficult, which is why we didn't collect them everywhere). We find that over 98% of the money was returned, so doesn't seem to be the case that people are contacting the owner but pocketing the cash.
> With money, there is an incentive to try to contact in the hope that if no response is received within a short period, the money can be kept.
Your notion makes zero sense. Wanting to keep the money never incentivizes contact. If they wanted to keep the money, the surest way to accomplish that is to just keep it.
I don't find it counterintuitive at all. It's just less of a big deal to lose a wallet that has no money in it than one that does have money in it.
In only one case do you actually lose money. Both cases require the same effort to make contact.
For the civic-honesty-minded person who has to balance that effort cost to themselves against the victim's loss, there's going to naturally be a stronger impulse to help the person who stands to lose more.
I agree. It depends on the value. If it's a wallet with an ID and CCs. Most likely the owner will at first chance cancel all CCs and request new ID. So the value is in the wallet itself. For the most part billfolds are cheap.
If it has lots of money that amount probably is a non-trivial amount to the wallet owner and you feel obligated to return it as you would want the same.
Looks like they didn't adjust for PPP when they did the experiment. Not sure it would make _much_ difference. But $13 might mean more in some places than in others. Even within the US. $13 in San Francisco vs $13 in dusty Fresno.
Right, but that's you. What about your expectations of how other people would react? I'm still pleasantly surprised.
Other reactions. I wasn't suprised to see the United States right in the middle. I was surprised that Canada wasn't further up. I was surprised that Russia was ahead of Canada.
And what makes Mexico so different than every other country?
I would probably only make a token effort to contact the owner – $13.45 isn't very much.
I would make proper effort if the wallet contained more money or a drivers license or bank cards. But around here no one is going to miss $13.45 and a shopping list.
I know that we're not supposed to impute astroturfing/shillage on HN, but the volume of similar, not-very-high-effort comments discussing one specific country out of the many that this report deals with, is, um... surprising. At this point, are we supposed to say as HN commenters "it's okay, these nice folks are just pretending to be wumao, just for the lulz of it", or what?
I wanted to see if they had collected data on how often the wallet was returned with the money. That was not part of the main experiment design[1] where the wallets were not actually collected, but they did collect wallets in Switzerland and Czech Republic to see if it was common to return the wallet, but keep the money. For these 2 countries at least about 99% of people did not keep the money when returning the wallet.
It is true that Japan has different culture. Japanese prefer to give the purse to the police stations rather than contact the owners directly. So it is reasonable to neglect the research result in Japan.
Guess what？CHINA HAS DIFF CULTURE TOOOOOOOOOOOOOO！
More than half Chinese don't use email in their daily life！（In fact, according to the research on Chinese Internet by government that was published in 2018, More than 60% Chinese netizen don't use email for years.） Chinese prefer WeChat（an communication app like WhatsApp）and phone call.
Also，Chinese prefer to give the items they found to Lost&Found police station，the staffs of the hotels, banks, restaurants than contact the owners directly，which kinds of same as Japanese.
Besides, if the item they found is precious or valuable（worth a lot of money）, then Chinese prefer to stay at the place and wait for the owners, in case the owners come back but can’t find the items immediately.
In what universe can the researchers considered Japanese culture difference but ignored Chinese culture difference?! Especially when both of them are from Asia countries. Just like I can’t imagine a research have considered Canada culture but ignored U.S. culture. It’s reasonable and logical to doubt that the researchers are not racists.
Shame on you, Science, for letting this unreasonable article being published.
Civic honesty x civic duty, actually. One of the variables you measured was whether that unknown guy's problem is worth my effort to contact them.
I'd guess (out of my ass, of course) that many people didn't steal it but also didn't bother. They just left it there for someone to come and pick it up. And I'd also guess they didn't trust they co-workers not to steal the money if they left the wallet there at the end of their shift, that's why more wallets with money were reported.
Civic honesty and duty cover most of it, I think, in the UK for example.
When I was living in Saudi Arabia for a time as a kid I was told not to pick up money even on the street or I could have my hand chopped off. However much truth there was to that message, I suspect that mentality could colour the results and probably falls outside honesty and duty.
I have to say that the methodology applied in this research lack basic social and cultural understanding. It is fair to say that Chinese hardly use email as their primary means of communication. Being in the States, I would use email to contact people. But back in China I would rather use WeChat. In addition, the design of the wallet looks weird and I would rather think that is a piece of garbage. Conventionally speaking, a wallet would contain some money, an ID card in some sort, and maybe credit/debit card in a actual wallet. Having a ID card makes thing so much easier: If I were to pick it up, I would just hand it to the Police and they would take care of it because there is a serial number on the ID that helps to context the person. But the design of this so-called wallet is dubious: a plastic warp with a business card ,a shopping list and a key? Hummmmm.
So clearly, this article failed to recognize the uniqueness of the social conditions in China and thus resulted in a biased and distorted conclusion. As a reverend publisher, Science and the editors should have realized the experimental flaws and the confounding variables that presented in this research, yet it still gets published. I hope the publisher should realize this and try their best to prevent it from happening again.
The experiment is just ridiculous. Even for Western countries like Australia. Imagine you lost wallet in a bus, and someone picked up. What is a normal reaction? The people notify the driver, the driver sent to lost@finding. And I am sure that department will never contact the wallet owner. Even for the owner comeback, a detailed ID check is necessary. And I believe here is no culture difference between Western and Asian. Here you may lack of understanding of lost property and the whole procedure of finding it. Then you just used biased data to prove “Chinese is dishonest”. That is not like a research people behavior. By the way in Australia, universities find students’ lost property will firstly use phone or message to contact students, less likely to use email. If researchers are from famous university, why not start investing the lost property recovering procedure at your home. In addition, I really don’t think there is strong correlation between ‘notify the owner’ and ‘honesty’
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
Normally we'd consider closing the thread in a case like this, to prevent it from being brigaded. But this is an unusual case and I'm curious to see how far it goes.
In case any of the new commenters happens to read this: I'm the lead moderator of Hacker News. Would you mind sharing with us how you found out about this discussion? It's unusual for us to see so much activity in a thread that is already several days old, and I'm curious to find out what happened.
[+] [-] lunamenina|6 years ago|reply
The news has been trending on Chinese sites for days, and when it's something as sensational as "China ranked lowest in global HONESTY study", people started to ask why, many went ahead and read the paper, found potential flaws in the design of the study, and wanted their questions answered. And when valid questions are not yet being addressed, many start to question the motivation behind this paper; the motivation of using labels like "honesty", that clearly has moral implications; the motivation behind Science publishing it, etc. Did the author exclude Japan because the result differed drastically from what was expected? Did the author include China because the result conveniently confirms the stereotypes? Are there any ethical concerns for such studies? After all, this seems to be a study about how likely it is for hotel staff to email the owner of the lost wallet in different countries, but it is being phrased into something much bigger.
Not saying those are real motivations of the paper, just emotions and speculation running wild in Chinese forums, then people get a bit angry, because they feel it's unjust, and they want to look for ways to communicate outside of Chinese social media.
Anyways, thanks for still keeping the discussion open. Most just want to have their voice heard, as they feel very, very strongly about it. And a possible explanation of commenting in Chinese is to force native English speakers to look up the translation, some sort of reference to how the study is conducted in English, even in China.
[+] [-] kiki1124|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sjuliaaaaa|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FenixP|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majia|6 years ago|reply
2. The difference between money and no-money percentage may be a better indicator of civil honesty. The absolute percentage reflects more about a “I’ll wait for someone to come” or “not my business” attitude of desk clerks.
3. It is better to put something important to the owner but not everyone else in the wallet, such as a driver license or national ID card. This could reduce “not my business” factor.
[+] [-] davetannenbaum|6 years ago|reply
1. This is a fair point. In the Supplemental Material, we explore cross-country differences in email usage. When we statistically adjust for country-level differences in email usage (using World Bank data), the country ranking remains essentially the same (adjusted rankings correlate over 0.90 with non-adjusted rankings). Also, when you restrict the data only to drop-offs performed at hotels -- which tend to rely on email more than other settings -- you see the same pattern of results.
2. Also a good point. However, there are mechanical problems with using the marginal differences between conditions -- for example, countries with high reporting rates in the NoMoney condition will be naturally capped in the possible size of the treatment treatment effect, compared to those with low reporting rates. Because the scale is bounded at 0 and 100% you're also fighting against reversion to the mean at the low and high ends of the distribution. FWIW we find that absolute levels of reporting rates correlate very highly with other known proxies of honesty both within and between countries (measures like tax evasion, corruption, etc), whereas relative differences between conditions do not.
3. We explicitly test this by randomly varying whether the wallets contained a key or not (valuable to the owner but not the recipient), while holding the rest of the contents in the wallet constant.
[+] [-] sumodm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wsxcde|6 years ago|reply
For example my MIL is a medical doctor, so is obviously educated, speaks English well and uses a smart phone but wouldn't be able to send email to a new contact. Same with WhatsApp, she can reply to messages from us but I don't think she knows how to add a new contact to her phone.
[+] [-] oska|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davetannenbaum|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghostbrainalpha|6 years ago|reply
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1540-5893.37...
Abstract
This article examines the lost property regime of Japan, which has one of the most impressive reputations in the world for returning lost property to its rightful owner, and compares it with that of the United States. Folk legend attributes Japanese lost‐and‐found success to honesty and other‐regarding preferences. In this article, I focus on another possible explanation: legal institutions that efficiently and predictably allocate and enforce possessory rights. These recognized, centuries‐old rules mesh with norms, institutional structures, and economic incentives to reinforce mutually the message that each sends and yields more lost‐property recovery than altruism alone.
[+] [-] mistermann|6 years ago|reply
To carry out the experiment, the presenter and his daughter visited the Tokyo Skytree’s Sola Machi entertainment complex’s food court and left a smartphone, purse, and shopping bag full of recently purchased items on table for two. Then they positioned themselves at another table and surreptitiously filmed what happened.
A solid hour passed, with no one at all disturbing their unprotected belongings. As a matter of fact, while at the food court they saw a number of other people also stake out tables using bags, purses, and even baby strollers, which, being wheeled, are particularly easy to run off with. Eventually, the presenter decided to retrieve his possessions, not because he was worried that someone would steal them, but because he thought the cleaning staff might think they’d been forgotten and take them to the lost-and-found.
This remarkable trustworthiness wasn’t a fluke, either. Next, the presenter and his daughter made their way to a Starbucks branch where he decided to leave even more tempting bait: his MacBook Pro.
He even placed the laptop, all by itself, on a table behind where he was seated…but 25 minutes later, it was still there, and the presenter decided to call it a wrap.
Amazing.
What's also amazing is that there seems to be a very common belief that when people move to another country, they entirely adopt the culture of that country. So, if Japanese people immigrate to a country where leaving your Macbook unattended in a coffee shop will result in it being stolen, it is expected that their theft statistics will rise to resemble that of the host country. I wonder how true this belief is.
[+] [-] Reedx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pickleRick243|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davetannenbaum|6 years ago|reply
My sense is that our results probably serve as a lower bound on reporting rates -- if the person who dropped off the wallet comes across as a local, reporting rates would be higher. But this is pure speculation.
[+] [-] roystonvassey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] humanrebar|6 years ago|reply
Other philosophies accept a flawed humanity and find hope in other things.
But most people don't think about it too much, I suspect. They love their dog, their kids, and a couple friends and that's good enough.
[+] [-] yskchu|6 years ago|reply
Pics: Fig S1 @ https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/suppl/2019/06/19/...
[+] [-] davetannenbaum|6 years ago|reply
The disadvantage of using a clear business-card case over a traditional wallet is clear, in that it is relatively unusual. The advantage of using a clear case, however, is that it affords considerably more experimental control in that you can be relatively certain that every recipient knows what is inside. With a wallet, there will be variation in who decides to inspect the wallet, and that introduces selection effects into the experimental design (i.e., are those who are willing to look inside a wallet, compared to those who don't, different in their degree of honesty?). This makes interpreting the evidence a lot more challenging.
FWIW we examined how our measure of civic honesty compares to other known proxies of honest behavior (tax evasion, corruption, etc) within and between countries. If there was something artificial or unique about our setting -- such as using unusual clear business card cases -- then you wouldn't expect our results to generalize or correlate with other measures of honest behavior. However, we find response rates correlate very highly with these other proxies of honesty, suggesting that they are tapping into some broader construct.
[+] [-] dmix|6 years ago|reply
That doesn’t look like any wallet I’ve ever seen. Did it really have to be clear and look like a plastic envelope? Maybe not enough random people would pick it up if it was a real dark wallet (vs say a staff member who cleans the place)?
It’s always good to question how the experiment reflects real life if we’re going to use it to influence real life policy and business decisions. But it’s possible this still sufficiently measured people’s honesty since the basic idea is the same (returning found property of value).
The other factor is the job title. Wouldn’t a “Software Engineer” be less likely to seem in need rather than the average (ie, working class) job title? Given a large enough pool I’m sure this could influence how people factored in the effort of finding the person vs feel-good emotional (or moral, ideological, etc) reward of doing good.
Basically: if the amount of the money mattered, then wouldn’t the job title of this new person whom you only know has business cards and a good job?
[+] [-] rossdavidh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sjuliaaaaa|6 years ago|reply
2) I feel dishonesty is a too big word and this title/claim goes too far. I think it more reflects the sense of responsibility of the employees at this particular job. 'Not my business' is different from being dishonest.
The workload, the degree of satisfaction towards the job and even how natural to communicate in English/via email will largely affect whether an employee would send out that email, which isn't part of their duty in their understanding. They might just leave it there at the counter. Again, I won't call that person being dishonest.
3) The nonusual looking of the wallet and the whole act might be more perceived as a spam or fishing for info in certain regions. In deed, when I moved to one big city in the US, I became less willing to reply to missing phone calls compared to a rather spam-free top city of a different country. Your subjects in certain countries might just be very alert to your behavior.
[+] [-] ppod|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davetannenbaum|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebg13|6 years ago|reply
Your notion makes zero sense. Wanting to keep the money never incentivizes contact. If they wanted to keep the money, the surest way to accomplish that is to just keep it.
[+] [-] jeremydeanlakey|6 years ago|reply
But after self-reflection, I'm more likely to report it if it did have money.
If it had money, I'd feel an obligation to protect it and return it to the owner. If it didn't, I'd feel more like it's their problem.
[+] [-] ebg13|6 years ago|reply
In only one case do you actually lose money. Both cases require the same effort to make contact.
For the civic-honesty-minded person who has to balance that effort cost to themselves against the victim's loss, there's going to naturally be a stronger impulse to help the person who stands to lose more.
[+] [-] mc32|6 years ago|reply
If it has lots of money that amount probably is a non-trivial amount to the wallet owner and you feel obligated to return it as you would want the same.
Looks like they didn't adjust for PPP when they did the experiment. Not sure it would make _much_ difference. But $13 might mean more in some places than in others. Even within the US. $13 in San Francisco vs $13 in dusty Fresno.
[+] [-] stronglikedan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tunesmith|6 years ago|reply
Other reactions. I wasn't suprised to see the United States right in the middle. I was surprised that Canada wasn't further up. I was surprised that Russia was ahead of Canada.
And what makes Mexico so different than every other country?
[+] [-] geowwy|6 years ago|reply
I would make proper effort if the wallet contained more money or a drivers license or bank cards. But around here no one is going to miss $13.45 and a shopping list.
[+] [-] president|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0815test|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dougmwne|6 years ago|reply
[1]https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/suppl/2019/06/19/...
[+] [-] ShLoss|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tangus|6 years ago|reply
I'd guess (out of my ass, of course) that many people didn't steal it but also didn't bother. They just left it there for someone to come and pick it up. And I'd also guess they didn't trust they co-workers not to steal the money if they left the wallet there at the end of their shift, that's why more wallets with money were reported.
[+] [-] cs02rm0|6 years ago|reply
When I was living in Saudi Arabia for a time as a kid I was told not to pick up money even on the street or I could have my hand chopped off. However much truth there was to that message, I suspect that mentality could colour the results and probably falls outside honesty and duty.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] FenixP|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] phasejump|6 years ago|reply
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