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Civic honesty around the globe (2019)
- FredPret 3y agoI wonder if this is affected by number of pedestrians. If you left a wallet a block from me in Canada I’d never see it as I drive past it.
- smcin 3y agoI doubt it, because they didn't leave the wallets in the street, but "in the reception area... of five types of societal institutions: (i) banks; (ii) theaters, museums, or other cultural establishments; (iii) post offices; (iv) hotels; and (v) police stations, courts of law, or other public offices."
- FredPret 3y agoThis might get affected by tourists then, so still not entirely foolproof. Almost 100% of my museum, theatre, and hotel time is spent in other countries. At least in Canada, I've spent maybe 30 minutes in a bank / post office in the past couple of years.
- smcin 3y agoThey're trying to measure the honesty of the people who work in those places, not people who drop wallets there. And I get your point that local people's reaction might be different if they thought the owner was a rich foreign tourist who was less likely to return or notice and report a theft. Also yeah sure there may be selection bias due to their choice of test locations, but their methodology seems as good as you can do for a broad international study.
- xkcd1963 3y ago[flagged]
- cochne 3y agoWhat is unscientific about the article?
- xkcd1963 3y ago[flagged]
- bigbillheck 3y agoThe same could be said for astronomy.
- xkcd1963 3y agoAstronomy is not a human science. It is a physical science that is concerned with the study of celestial objects such as stars, planets, galaxies, and the universe as a whole. Astronomers use mathematics, physics, and chemistry to explain the nature and motion of these objects. Astronomy is also the study of the origin, evolution, and composition of the universe, as well as the search for extraterrestrial life. Everything that falls within the scope of astronomy is based on natural phenomena, which means it is impossible to conduct experiments in a traditional laboratory setting. Astronomy is, therefore, solely based on observation and analysis in which the astronomer seeks to explain what is happening outside of Earth’s atmosphere.
- InCityDreams 3y agoPerhaps they meant astrology?
- dahart 3y agoSocial sciences are also based on observation and analysis. That’s the definition of science: observing and analyzing to form testable predictions. Science is not defined by whether the subject is stars or humans, it is defined by the process.
- jsnk 3y agoI wish they had done this in Japan, Korea and Taiwan as well.
- a5withtrrs 3y agoJapan especially as they are particularly well known for their civic honesty.
- anigbrowl 3y agoI had a vision of the experimenters being prosecuted for wasting police/people's time by causing problems on purpose. Edit: the above was a joke, but had a grain of truth. The authors addressed this specific question in a reply to readers' letters: We did not exclude Japan from our study because their reporting rate was too low (if anything, Japan would have scored relatively high among countries in civic honesty). Since our focus was on investigating the difference in reporting rates between wallets with and without money, our decision rule was to exclude countries where individual wallets could not be identified. Japan has a unique system with lots of small police booths (Koban system) where citizens return lost objects. While we found a large number of our wallets listed on official lost and found websites, we were not able to retrieve these wallets as it would have required proof of ownership and identification documents. As a result, we were not able to find out the unique email addresses or the original locations of the wallets and we could not ascertain (among other things) to which experimental condition the wallet belonged. As we were primarily interested in the difference between experimental conditions, we had to exclude Japan from the paper. By contrast, we do not have evidence of similar systematic behavior from other countries.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- davetannenbaum 3y agoActually one of our research assistants was temporarily detained (in Kenya, I believe) for suspicious activity. As you can imagine, having a bunch of "lost" wallets on hand required some explaining.
- jasmer 3y ago[dead]
- bloomfilter 3y agoThe setup of this experiment has a major flaw, the business card has only email address and in countries where email was never fully adopted like China or other, people would need to go extra miles to contact the wallet owner.
- PaulHoule 3y agoWould note the U.S. is absolutely average but China is very bad.
- mc32 3y agoQuestion is, how did the US slide down below Russia and Romania? That's not a good sign.
- bogtog 3y agoRomania is very different from Russia
- dauertewigkeit 3y agoWhat sort of question is that? Why do you assume that Russia and Romania should rank low in civic honesty?
- mc32 3y agoIn Eastern countries, officially things were "cooperative" centric, in reality, breadlines and such meant you looked out for number one.
- myth_drannon 3y agoThat's extreme generalization and is not based on reality. I will assume the author never been to Eastern bloc. Breadlines are a thing of just end of 80's. So 5 years max of entire history of the region? I find the culture was less individualistic. Now of course it shifted but still core values remain. And each part of the bloc has variations of course.
- xyzzyz 3y agoLines for literal bread were only 80s thing to be sure, but general shortages of everything, bribing officials to be advanced in a queue to get apartment, or a car, or bribing shopkeepers to get dibs on building materials, or bribing doctors to get better care, or bribing nurses to get better rooms and beds, has been a constant throughout most of 20th century.
- IceHegel 3y agoInteresting that in Mexico and Peru the wallet without money was returned more often than the one with money. The gap was larger in Mexico.
- noduerme 3y agoThat checks out. Also, your best chance in China is worse than your worst chance in India, which argues against the theory that this correlates to GDP.
- ndlan 3y ago[flagged]
- throwbadubadu 3y agoIn what way?
- dpc050505 3y agothere's an obvious correlation between population density and civic honesty (as well as pretty much every other QOL metric)
- Tade0 3y agoI have to ask which way, because China and Poland have roughly the same population densities but are on other ends of the scale.
- renewiltord 3y agoThe Asian countries score high on these (Japan isn't listed in the table but would have been high). That sort of makes this conclusion not fact-supported.
- kergonath 3y agoWhy would that be? And do you have any data about this?
- eertami 3y agoSwitzerland is 25% immigrants yet it is also top of the leader board.
- ndlan 3y ago[flagged]
- lusus_naturae 3y ago
- wiseowise 3y ago[dead]
- anovikov 3y agoImportant thing to consider is that many people may not report the wallet and not touch it being afraid of a rather popular scam when people who reported the stolen wallet were confronted with a claim that it had way more money inside and extorted on that amount. That actually happened to people i know in Russia. So in a way it may be simply a reflection of some countries being more criminal or dangerous so people just "mind their business", not that they are particularly dishonest.
- lxe 3y agoUnderrated comment. I think this sentiment alone skews the data significantly. The study needs to asses whether the wallet is picked up or not. In many places in the world, people won't pick up random wallets simply due to fear of getting scammed.
- lolc 3y agoThe wallets were handed over to staff, didn't need picking up.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- digdugdirk 3y agoLooks like they picked the 5 largest cities in each country listed. I'd be far more interested to see the disparity between large cities, smaller cities, and smaller towns/villages for each country.
- anigbrowl 3y agoLook into the Supplementary Information linked at the end, which addresses some of your concerns and enables you to design your own experiment.
- dleslie 3y agoIndeed, for instance: Canada is a rather diverse country and I think it would be safe to expect a different experience in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary and Vancouver; but an enormous difference between those and the rural areas of each province.
- bshipp 3y agoThis rural/urban divide is probably a dynamic worth exploring regardless of region. The relative anonymity of large urban areas provides very different incentives toward maintaining personal integrity than in a small rural town where reputation damage can result in real and permanent losses. I'm not arguing rural is better than urban; on the contrary, damage caused by idle gossip can permanently ostracize a person for reasons beyond their control and result in long term economic and social damage. The dynamic of smaller groups vs large anonymous groups is one worth exploring, in my humble opinion.
- DharmaPolice 3y agoIf I'm reading their experiment correctly, they're only targeting employees behind the counter in public buildings. I'd be curious to know whether that influences the results at all. Clearly there's a cultural element to dishonesty but I'd guess that poorer less equal countries are going to do worse vs richer more equal ones. edit: Also, I'm not sure if keeping the money is strictly speaking "dishonest". Yeah it's a bad thing but if your philosophy is finders keepers then, is that dishonest?
- prometheus76 3y agoThey said in their study that even when they accounted for GDP, the effect remained.
- DharmaPolice 3y agoI was thinking of Gini coefficient.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoAre there any ancient moral traditions that espouse 'finders keepers losers weepers'?
- davetannenbaum 3y agoOne of the study authors here. On targeting front-desk employees, we did this both to allow relatively portable cross-country comparisons and for reasons of internal validity (e.g., if we placed wallets on the ground, then can participants "select" into the study which compromises our ability to draw causal inferences). On your last point about whether it's dishonest to hold onto a wallet. The question is about the treatment effect --- all things equal, is it more dishonest to hold onto a wallet with money vs no money? We polled nationally representative samples in the US, UK, and Poland and in all three countries most people thought so.
- dshacker 3y agoAmazing study, was really interesting to read. How do you get to do this studies? How does someone get into social science like this? How did you pay for all the tickets for all the cities?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- noduerme 3y agoI accidentally left my wallet in a taxi on the way from Madrid airport into central Madrid. The taxi driver actually called me and came back a couple hours later. (I gave her 100 Euros that she could have simply taken). Unfortunately, the next day the same wallet was snatched out of my pocket in the Plaza Mayor, and I didn't realize it until I reached to pay for a meal. Talk about variance.
- skilled 3y agoI was doing sightseeing in Pokhara (Nepal) with my friend some years ago, and on a boat trip across the Phewa Lake, I left my camera behind in the boat and thought I had lost it. They actually came back to find me and give it back to me. I had already settled on the idea that I will never get it back.
- noduerme 3y agoyes! It's amazing. Another one in this vein.. my girlfriend left her hat in a car when we were hitchhiking in France. We didn't realize it until we had wandered off around a village. An hour later the boy and girl who had given us a ride tracked us down and gave her her hat back. It was a very cool Australian cowboy hat.
- seer 3y agoHa, in Kerela, India my backpack fell off my bike, with cash, passport and laptop inside. 2 hours later when I started searching for it, a couple of ex-military dudes found me on the road - they were looking for me all around on their scooter, as they saw the backpack fall from the bike next to the dam they were guarding. Took nothing from it as well. I gave them some cash as a thank you of course. Rural India seems like a very safe space to loose things in as a lot of people seem to be helpful and not opportunistic. I guess they might just not be accustomed to european stuff so might not really know what to do with it. Regardless I was extremely grateful to those two guys that saved me a lot of hassle reissuing my passport.
- hospitalJail 3y agoWeird to see such high petty theft countries near the top of the list too. No one tells you to pin your pockets shut when you visit NYC. Everyone tells you all sorts of ways to keep your belongings safe in Europe.
- wood_spirit 3y agoI live in one of the very high response rate countries and would imagine that the unreturned wallets were just binned, and that those containing money are more likely to be returned simply because there is obvious benefit to recipient to have it returned. When you lose a wallet you cancel your cards etc, even change the locks if you loose your keys, so people will reason that there is no big point to returning it anyway?
- sandworm101 3y ago>> even change the locks if you loose your keys That phrase has always struck me as particularly American, and western American. In many places people talk of "getting the locks changed" rather than "changing the locks". It's the difference between doing something to the locks rather than swapping them out for new ones. I guess that is a reflection of the general poor quality of locks used in the US: Buying a new lock is cheaper than getting a locksmith to rekey an existing lock. And when I was on the east coast I do remember seeing more locksmiths (at least their storefronts/trucks) than on the on the west.
- CommieBobDole 3y agoI don't think that's true at all - replacing even cheap locks would be much more expensive than having them re-keyed. I'm sure replacement happens, say if someone wants to upgrade to better locks at the same time or is unaware that locks can be re-keyed, but I doubt it's the norm. I think 'changing the locks' is just the American way of saying 'getting the locks re-keyed'. If that phrasing is even uniquely American, which I'm not sure of either.
- anigbrowl 3y agoIt really isn't. I replaced my front door lock last year and I think the replacement cost me about $30. I hadn't done it before but it was easy to figure out, took about 15 minutes.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> replacing even cheap locks would be much more expensive than having them re-keyed. Replacing a cheap (or even average household) lock is cheaper than the minimum labor charge a locksmith will charge to show up, but you still need someone to do the labor of replacing it. Also, if you use certain brands of lock, if you buy one new lock of the same brand it comes with a special rekeying tool that will allow you to rekey all your matching-brand locks to the key that comes with the new lock.
- arc-in-space 3y agoMy main takeaway is to keep a bit of cash and an email adress in a wallet. Also, I have to wonder how much the fact that the assistants would have been perceived as foreigners in most of these countries skews the results.
- davetannenbaum 3y agoDefinitely a concern. We took steps to examine if there were specific "experimenter effects", that is whether response rates were affected by one research assistant rather than another, and don't find evidence that was a factor. But that doesn't address your broader concern that things might be different if the person dropping off the wallet was native to the country. FWIW the wallets were designed to signal that the owner was probably a local and not a foreigner.
- arc-in-space 3y agoThank you for the response! I did miss the supplementary material notes.
- js2 3y agoThis study is cleverly designed and found non-intuitive results (as measured by the study itself). Penultimate paragraph: > We conducted field experiments in 40 countries to examine whether people act more dishonestly when they have a greater economic incentive to do so, and we found the opposite to be true. Citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained relatively larger amounts of money. This finding is robust across countries and institutions and holds even when economic incentives for dishonesty are substantial. Our results are consistent with theoretical models that incorporate altruism and self-image concerns, but they also suggest modification in that nonpecuniary motivations directly interact with the material benefits gained from dishonest behavior. When people stand to heavily profit from engaging in dishonest behavior, the desire to cheat increases but so do the psychological costs of viewing oneself as a thief—and sometimes the latter will dominate the former.
- didntcheck 3y agoComplete armchair analysis but I'd have thought this is definitely more about empathy than viewing oneself as a thief? I imagine a lot of people would look at a lost $1000 and think "I'd be devastated if I lost that!", and therefore put the effort into returning it. But I have to admit that if I found a wallet that only had $10 in, I wouldn't keep it but I would be a lot more lazy about returning it because "I can't really be arsed and he's probably not missing it much" In terms of "viewing oneself as a thief", I feel like I would do that even if I kept the $10 wallet, though I guess maybe I would feel like more of one the higher the amount is
- davetannenbaum 3y agoWe tested both ideas (altruism and theft aversion) in the paper. Short answer is we find evidence for both. For somewhat technical reasons, we think the "viewing oneself as a thief" component is probably necessary in order to observe higher return rates for wallets with money than wallets without money. But certainly both elements are at play.
- gyf304 3y agoI believe the methodology is flawed. > The business cards displayed the owner’s name and email address and we used fictitious but commonplace male names for each country. This is assuming that email is a ubiquitous communication method in all countries, which is not true. USA has a very high email penetration rate, so does Japan (where all phones use email instead of SMS). On the other end of the spectrum, China's email penetration rate is less than 40% [1]. Business in China is conducted over WeChat and phone calls instead of email. If the person receiving the wallet does not have an email account, or doesn't even know what email is, I'd imagine the email contact rate to be quite low. [1] https://www.twinova.com/email-dead-long-live-wechat/#:~:text=Email%20Newsletter%20is%20Dying%20in%20China&text=The%20statistics%20below%20from%20CNNIC,a%20paltry%20rate%20of%2026.9%25 https://www.twinova.com/email-dead-long-live-wechat/#:~:text....
- davetannenbaum 3y agoA valid concern, but a couple points: (1) This issue doesn't affect the treatment effect (the difference in return rates for money vs no money), which was the main focus of the paper. If email usage is low in a particular country, that should affect return rates equally in both the money and no money conditions. (2) We've done a number of robustness checks on the point about email usage and have not been able to find evidence that it has a meaningful impact on the results. For instance, when looking at cross country differences in wallet return rates, the rank order correlation between the "raw" data and one that statistically adjusts for email penetration rates (based on World Bank data) is 0.95.
- gyf304 3y agoThank you for your reply. Here are my thoughts on your 2 points. (1) Noted. The main graphic emphasizes reporting rate over the delta, in both the axes selection and the ranking - and indeed the ranking is the main takeaway from many of the readers. If you rank by percentage delta of report rate, the graphic would be drastically different. This newer graphic wouldn't be "fair" either, as countries with higher control (no money) report rate would have a relatively low percentage delta. (2) The World Bank Enterprise Survey data is listed under the title "Percent of firms using e-mail to interact with clients/suppliers" (for which China is at 85%) which I think is not the same as email penetration rate (which in the above reference in my parent comment, is at <40%). I understand your reasoning that cross country data is hard to come across. I also read your reply in Science. I believe that while there are multiple limitations conducting the research - all perfectly reasonable - the limitations nonetheless affected the credibility of Fig. 1 - the main figure of the paper. It is also mentioned in the reply that creating new social accounts is unfeasible. While I think this is true, wouldn't a single account per platform suffice? Most social platforms allow anonymity for display names / handles. If the social account name does not bear resemblance to an actual name, I don't think the participants would notice.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y agoNot surprised to see Kazakhstan at the bottom of the list (I am more surprised to find us there at all). We have insane levels of corruption: almost anything can be "solved" by knowing the right people and spending a bit of money. There has also been somewhat of a news streak recently about taxi drivers fleecing hundreds of dollars off credulous tourists for a ride around the block. Most people communicate over the internet through WhatsApp and Telegram, but everyone I know has an email account and knows how to use it, so I don't think that's the reason. The only consolation is that China has managed to score even worse.
- lo_zamoyski 3y agoOne glaring presupposition (which is false) of "rationalist approaches", but also those who reject them, yet maintain the same inherently hyper-individualistic, atomistic conception of human beings[0], is immediately apparent in the first sentence of the abstract: "Rationalist approaches to economics assume that people value their own interests over the interests of strangers." It is NOT in my interest to be dishonest. To think it is is to fail to understand that human nature is thoroughly social and that, because of that, there is a common good. The common good is prior to private good; the latter depends on the former, not the other way around, as liberal philosophy conceives it. Thus, maximizing my own interest, by which I mean my own good, is to live maximally in conformity with human nature, and part of that means living in a way that recognizes the primacy of the common good. Dishonesty per se is also harmful to the individual in the very act of being dishonest. A person is corrupted in the very act of being dishonest. [0] I am not denying the existence or worth of individuals. I reject collectivism which is ready to throw the individual under the bus for the collective (which is rather incoherent). I mean only the conception of human beings as atomic, in which society is merely transactional or contractual, instead od recognizing transactions as a subset of actions that occur within a social context and only where transactions are appropriate and make sense).
- alephxyz 3y agoWhat happens if you're in a society where most people are dishonest and expect other people to also be dishonest?
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y agoHumans are deceptive by nature so we always have to read between the lines and pick up on hints and context
- SongofEarth 3y agoIt's important to note that most Chinese people hardly ever use email, the Internet started rather late in China, for most Chinese people the Internet means smartphone and WeChat, and WeChat often is the only place where business communication happens, had they put a WeChat QR code on the business card, the result would be much more interesting.
- pphysch 3y agoImportant cultural difference that the study failed to highlight. You'd probably see a similar <15% success rate if you used a WeChat QR code for contact in the West. People might scan the code, but stop once they realize it's an unfamiliar platform that they don't have an account for.
- davetannenbaum 3y agoIt's a fair point, but we've tried to test this issue in a number of different ways. Based on the available data, cross country differences in email usage doesn't seem to have a meaningful impact on our results. See my comment above to gyf304.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dang 3y agoDiscussed at the time: Civic honesty around the globe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20236444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20236444 - June 2019 (395 comments)
- Dig1t 3y agoSuper weird that Mexico is so different on the money/noMoney wallet test. It's the only country that has its return rate flipped. i.e. wallets containing money are LESS likely to be returned than wallets not containing money. Basically every single other country had it the other way around. I wonder why that is. Is there a cultural aspect to it? Also kind of bummed that Japan and Korea are not on the list, would have been interesting to compare.
- dirtyid 3y agoThere's note editors reply to comments at bottom of study on why PRC was included authors knowing wechat was dominant acknowledge creating 1000s of phone numbers and social accounts not realistitic. ALso this claim: > cross-country comparisons were not the focus of our paper. We largely focused on how lost wallet reporting rates were affected by the amount of money inside the wallet Despite baity title "Civic honesty around the globe" - which they also acknowledge was baity. And then imply Chinese are basically dishonest due to some questionable correlations on shadow banking, test cheating, unpaid UN diplomat parking tickets, corruption index lol. And a bunch of rationalization why Japanese data was excluded despite having even lower return rates due to reasons that applied to PRC. It's long read explanation that's well rationalized sometimes and raise eyebrows others depending on your biases. This was big news on PRC net when study was first released and IMO authors didn't really address the criticisms of prejudice sufficiently. That said I think broadly believable, low email use, secular country (not concerned with karma), people too busy to bother a shit, probably result in low return rates. PRC can always pull a south Korea and use surveillance to enforce wallet returns or face fans.
- pmontra 3y agoNews from today, Milan, Italy "Retired man finds 10k Euros and gives them back to the owner. Reward of 500 Euros: 'too much'" https://milano.corriere.it/notizie/lombardia/23_luglio_07/como-pensionato-trova-10-mila-euro-per-strada-e-li-restituisce-al-proprietario-me-ne-ha-dati-500-di-ricompensa-anche-troppo-81a7194a-2ac6-4754-8f2e-91ff1d94bxlk.shtml https://milano.corriere.it/notizie/lombardia/23_luglio_07/co...