What is it about Chinese society that makes you say that? Not having a go here, I legitimately know nothing about it. If stranger-trust is so low, what societal branches does trust hang on? Is it family, business, political, local..? Is it mediated through technology like WeChat?
There were a lot of reports in the Chinese news a while ago about people being taken in by scammers that pretended to be injured, had the mark help them, and then claimed that the mark's help proved they had a guilty conscious and was responsible and owed them monetary reparations.
This sort of came to a head when a small child was run over and many pedestrians passed without helping.
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.
> 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.
>Wanting to keep the money never incentivizes contact.
It could in combination with the authors' hypothesis of not wanting to view oneself as a thief. Under that condition, the likely behaviour is to simply let the wallet sit in a lost-and-found drawer. Writing the email starts the clock on a license to take it while giving yourself a rationalization.
zero sense, really? a lost wallet has been handed in, and at least one other person has witnessed the wallet being handed in (not even assuming cctv, other people, or supervisors).
you don't know if the wallet owner or that original person will turn up and make enquiries as to what happened, and of you just keep the money, there is a real risk your actions being discovered.
whereas at least if you TRY to return the wallet, when you do eventually keep the money, you have an angle of both plausible defense, and arguably, natural justice on your side...
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.
>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.
Is that 98% going back to locations that had contacted you? I'd be interested in the figure for returning to locations that didn't contact you, say after a week. But In understand how it could be logistically tricky. Congrats on the paper.
Yes, we only went back for those who contacted us first. Your idea is an interesting one, but it gets at something else (how many people, who otherwise would keep the wallet, instead would turn over the wallet when confronted by the owner). We collected wallets from those who contacted us to rule out the possibility that they are returning the wallets empty.
I'm guessing that's because they measured the return rate of institutions:
"Wallets were returned to one of five societal institu-
tions: (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."
The study was specifically careful to make the wallet appear to have been lost by a member of the local community. Returning the wallet is an act of civic honesty as it relates to helping someone who is essentially a member of the same community, someone arguably bound by the same social contract as the person given the "lost" wallet.
Interesting. Last time I returned a lost wallet, it was to New Jersey (I'm on Canada's West coast, where this was found). People will return wallets from outside of their community. It seems odd to restrict them that way and then ascribe the motivation to some "civic" reasoning.
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.
They controlled for exactly what you are saying. They added a key which has value only to the wallet owner and not the finder. There was not as big of an increase in returns. This led them to conclude the more likely explanation was the “I’m not a thief” reasoning.
I don't think the key is a strong control without more information about the key.
Say I've lost both a house key and also enough information to, in the current era of scummy personal information aggregation websites, find out my home address, which you can definitely commonly do based on just name and email address and an assumption of local residency. Then regardless of whether I get the key back I should in paranoia change the locks on my house, because now an unscrupulous person who found it easily has a copy of the key and knows exactly where to use it.
So if it's a house key, then in defense it should have no more value to me but has significant (hopefully temporary) value to them.
I'm not sure if the key is like that. In today's age of easy key duplication, you probably have key backups via your relationships and you could go to a key duplication vending machine and get it done for $5 when you go to a grocery store.
I'm quite impressed how in most countries, it's a function of empathy vs. how much hassle it is to return things.
Except that getting the key back still means changing the locks because the finder could have duplicated it, so it seems like there's not a lot of value in giving it back except in the case that it's their only copy that they will use until they change the lock.
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.
Quick clarification: we did adjust for purchasing power parity across countries (but not within countries). As you surmised, even for differences between cities like SF and Fresno, the PPP adjustments would be negligible for the wallet amounts we were using.
The amount of money in the wallet would have to be well over $100 before I was more sad about that than about having to get my ID and various other cards re-issued. I can't get closer to the exact amount where the tipping point would be without it happening, but definitely higher than that.
[EDIT] narrowing it down, I'd probably be sadder about the money at $500. So it's somewhere between those numbers.
Wallets are pretty cheap, if I found one with just some business cards and no money I'd in all honestly just toss it in the trash and assume it was litter...
I agree. I don't care about the money or the cards in my wallet, but having to go to the DMV to get my license replaced would be the absolute worst part.
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'm Mexican, and this results baffles me too. I would say that maybe current perception of government corruption (which has been declining for years and is really really low) has a lot to do, since many people might feel that Mexican society is in debt with them because of the poor perception we have against the current state of affairs.
Also I wonder if this was done in big cities like Mexico City (my guess) or more evenly distributed. I have a perception that Mexican society in general is pretty honest, but big cities are more rootless and impersonal. But this didn't seem to apply to India or other high density countries.
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 don't know why people are so cynical, the results are generally what I would have imagined.
Most interesting - the $13/$100 difference.
Notice that in the US and UK, the 'return rate' goes way up when there's $100 in the wallet, but when only $13 it's quite low.
In Switzerland and Sweden, it's high even for $13.
I think there might be a difference between 'core conscientiousness' and 'meaningful conscientiousness'.
In Sweden and Switzerland, it's a matter of propriety to 'return the wallet'. It's appropriate behaviour. They have smaller, tighter communities, you may even know the person. So they 'just do the right thing' because it doesn't matter what's in the wallet.
In the US/UK culture the thinking might be $13 - nobody is care, it's not worth the hassle to report. But as soon as there's money, then it becomes a material matter of conscientiousness, i.e. 'people will miss $100, it's worth the effort to report it'.
I think $13 is just not really enough money, not that much different from $0. It's almost change.
$100 is a nice, meaningful threshold.
Finally, China ... ouch.
Also, the results are perfectly correlated with transparency international index [1]
It's interesting because it may be that 'corruption' is not just a systematic issue in governance, but it may be correlated or predicted with even more basic levels of civic conscientiousness, as measured by tests such as this.
I wonder if the fact that physical wallets as a construct are undeniably western affect the study in any way. For example, do people even use wallets in China? They've long since focused on electronic payments as opposed to cash. There's a reason the authors stopped short of making any social commentary in their study.
The Chinese invented paper money :) so it's not as though the concept is foreign to any of them. While there might be some differences between cultures in that regard, I think it's kind of a stretch to try to explain away the not very nice data points. I think the data can probably be interpreted in a straight forward manner: if you lose something in China, you're not going to get it back and that's that. It is what it is.
"There's a reason the authors stopped short of making any social commentary in their study." I think because it would be way out of bounds. Casual commenters such as us have a little space to speculate (unless dang gets fussy), but it'd be too improper for researchers to make assumptions.
One major thing missing in this study is the rural/urban divide. I suggest London is not representative in any way of the rest of the UK, and neither is Manchester the same as Penzance.
Edit: I should note that the authors do indeed go into trying to find cultural correlates, they go right for '% protestant' etc. and make some fairly speculative comments which I would be uncomfortable with because these are all just correlations. Notably, one of the highest 'correlations' is 'latitude' (!), it's not as though being at a certain latitude makes one more civic. Maybe there are other, related, factors, but it's certainly not latitude.
You missed my point and I don't think it's a stretch, especially if you don't understand their culture. A better analogy would be if you would return a sack of $100 in nickels, I think most people would leave it. I'm not too familiar myself but if the entire country has moved on to mobile payments, people would be less inclined to return obsolete forms of money. Perhaps someone more familiar can explain better.
No one is questioning that China understands paper money.
The question is do they store this paper money is wallets? Or is it carried in a pocket? Or do they have full sized binders the money is put in? Or fanny packs? Do they even carry cash anymore?
They use wallets, paper money just like the rest of us. Though there's a recent phenom of 'cashless', cash is still normative, moreover, this is a very recent thing.
A 'wallet' in China is the the same thing as a 'wallet' in the USA or Sweden.
I know that. Or at least assumed that. I just wanted to clarify what my GP was asking as I felt people were taking it too literal.
Like how women in the US carry purses. I've never been to another country. Do all cultures use purses? If they do is it both genders or only one? I don't know.
The authors admitted above that they excluded Japan because of cultural differences (otherwise Japan would have been at the bottom). All other countries/regions most culturally similar to China, including South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, are not included possibly because of cultural differences. Yet the result from China is totally to be trusted. Bravo.
I was raised in China and certainly got many of my lost things back growing up. Just because many Chinese folks prefer not to contact the owners directly does not mean they do not use other ways to return lost items :)
Almost agree all except if you lose sthing in China, YOU are going to search for it. One of the social norms is to leave it there, don't pick it up if it's on the floor, so that when people come back it stays where it used to be. Plus passive waiting is the common practice: not your job to find the owner. The silly one who lose the wallet does their own job.
this makes it more difficult to get it back than in some of the top rated countries. Do hope to change. But this is not really about civic honesty.
I don't have any data to back this up, just knowledge about Chinese society. My view is the main driver for the low score for China is the society norm of minding your own business and not getting involved. So it might not be a measure of honesty but rather a measure of being passive. For example, I would assume if instead of having to contact the person, the person just walked over to retrieve the wallet, they'd likely get it back.
I think the contents of the wallet are too much like junk without the money. Some business cards, a grocery list and a key in a transparent wallet. To me that's almost as junk as finding some fliers and I might think somebody has just thrown it away as litter and $13 is like lunch money. So it has to has $100 so I think "they might want this".
If it was a regular wallet full of useful cards, perhaps some sentimental things like photos etc. then I'd want to get it back to them regardless of whether it contained some cash. I think this experiment might work better with a backpack or a mobile phone.
The description of the wallet does make it sound like garbage. They probably should have used a higher quality (if well-worn) wallet in the prevailing local style. Lots of issues with this study design in general.
Thank you for the comment. But the thing is... the researchers have obviously negelected that fact that there are countries where email is NOT that commonly used or the way they think it's used. It's not about being cynical; it's about being objective actually.
I found a wallet in a parking lot of a mall in Warsaw, Poland. The customer info desk would accept it, citing "internal regulations". Maybe I should just have dropped the wallet on their desk and run away :)
(Owner found me, because the info desk at least wrote down my number)
Nuremberg, Germany: I once found a wallet with most of the cash already gone, but loads of cards and ID cards in it, and other stuff, pretty thick. I went to the police - and they were not exactly happy. They would have preferred to send me elsewhere but admitted they were the only ones open at the time. I can understand why they felt that way - it took well over an hour, every single tiny item in the wallet had to be catalogued, an arduous procedure for sure.
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?
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.
It's a fantastic idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dban. A term for police is お巡りさん, "patrolman" (or, as I first read it, Mr. Walkaround lol). They're known for their neighborhood foot patrols as well as staffing the kōban, are very much a part of the community, and in my opinion play a big part in the very safe feeling Westerners often feel in Japan.
Then you have a chicken and egg problem. The cycle will be broken eventually; better to do it now in a controlled manner, even if it will be far from easy.
I was imagining the United States. I thought people would be more willing to approach a booth, which includes a physical barrier. While many people are afraid of the police, they nonetheless serve a necessary function, and many people are dissatisfied with the effectiveness of the police in their communities.
It's more that the police are nearly always there to enforce punitive things rather than improve an actual public good.
Instead of designing things properly (large scale zoning, zoning laws that make sense, building codes to improve the quality of life) we make poor decisions based on cheep and fast; externalize the costs; then make living with those costs a fear/punishment based enforcement.
If "peace officers" were out doing only commonly agreed good things, improving lives rather than being 'tough on crime' then they'd be part of a solution rather than a problem.
It's not really a proper solution, but libraries serve as a kind of alternative "official authority" for things like that in the part of the US where I currently live (one of their many unofficial jobs that aren't properly accounted for or funded). People seem to drop off stuff in the library even if they didn't find it there, because it's a place you can easily enter, and librarians are perceived as having some kind of official status (being government employees), but compared to others are seen as approachable and pretty honest and benign. So people assume the librarian will probably know what to do with the wallet and probably won't just pocket the cash. And, many people are less apprehensive about walking up to a library front desk compared to walking into a police station.
Well then, welcome to my world. Where I live - provincial Denmark - these days our local police resides behind a desk ... at the library.
Mind you, this is police of a variety radically different from just about any aspect of American police I've ever seen described. Our police structure and organisation is in shambles, but at the personal level, a police officer is first and foremost a service provider, and the ones I've interacted with over the years have been unfailingly professionel, non-threatening, and polite. Also: Fit and never, ever overweight.
Are people really that scared of police in the US that they wouldn't return some lost property to them?
I'm Australian and the idea of that blows me away. Like a third-world country. I've seen all the videos of shootings and disgraceful behaviour but I thought those were probably all rare incidents in bad neighbourhoods.
Here in Australia, I've had nothing but professional interactions with our police. I wouldn't hesitate to call them if there was a need or take a lost object to them.
Our laws are certainly heading more and more in a scary direction however.
Some are and some aren’t. I wouldn’t call it an “unusual” perspective as the sibling commenter did here, but I would say it’s probably not the perspective of the majority. It’s also going to vary depending on who you are and where you are.
Because the cost of being arrested, shot, etc. is quite high, it’s arguably logical to avoid most if not all interactions with them even if the odds of something going wrong seem relatively low, particularly when you have little to nothing to gain from engaging.
Even if you calculate that you’re not at significant personal risk from engaging, it might make sense to do so for other reasons, e.g. in solidarity with others who are targeted unfairly, and/or (plausibility of this aside) to simply attempt to get along without them.
Hm.. wouldn't it bias your results in some countries too? I used to live in Poland, now living in Switzerland (both topping the chart), and in both countries it's pretty customary to drop found wallets/IDs at police stations.
Btw, in both countries there's a rule (at least in Poland it's in the civic law, probably more like a custom in Switzerland), that the person who found your wallet can receive some share (finder's fee) of money, in Poland currently 10%.
Probably a flat minimum. In the US I'd imagine it'd best be a log curve starting with a minimum of "minimum wage (of an hour)" and then shifting to a % of the cash inside. Something like a gentle decay curve where every base 10 increase there's a halving of the percent cut.
Hmm, I live in Poland and once I found a lost wallet (no money inside, so probably someone stole it, almost every one has some small cash there, at least coins) and my first reaction was to mail it to the person it belongs to, there was a national ID inside and I did that.
It never occurred to me to get it to the Police station.
Probably because they never found my wallet when I reported it (and reporting it was a PITA, 2 hours of lot time).
So you excluded Japan because there is an alternative mechanism that can cause low reporting rate. How can you be sure other countries don't have something similar (alternative mechanisms) that may account for the low reporting rate?
Exactly. I was raised in China and our culture shares many similarities with the Japanese. Some of us tend not to bother strangers unless necessary since it might be seen as rude. In these experiments, I imagine a fair number of Chinese simply decided to wait for the owners of lost items coming to them instead of the other way around.
I did not expect China to top the list or anywhere near there, but such cherry picking of data is indeed concerning. By the way, where are South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Singapore? Were these countries/regions (culturally similar to China) also excluded because the data did not fit the authors' expectations?
That’s interesting. As far as I know, China has the similar feature. Why do you still include China in this paper without any pilot testing. Or do you already presumed some opinion and then just gladly accepted the result since it proved your stereotype on Chinese people?
I strongly suggest that you should re-design the experiment and do similar pilot tests in China. We have similar culture compared to Japan, and it is not fair to make such conclusions.
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.
I remember watching 'lost wallet test' videos on youtube while back. Vloggers test leaving expensive stuff and/or wallet in cafe/subway and see if it gets taken by strangers.
In some nations, stuff just wasn't touched at all for hours.
I didn't think a scientific study would be done on this and published.
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.
Isn't there a degree of "apathy" vs. "honesty" here? A person could be fully honest, but just not care enough to take the time to contact the owner of the wallet. It doesn't seem they considered that in the study design?
I don't want to say that the study was a failure, because I don't know what the standard for a successful study is, but it reads like they are trying to gloss over the fact that they did not actually end up measuring honesty.
On smaller scales, this seems to be a popular experiment. I recall hearing, in the popular press, related experiments on city neighborhoods and university departments. (Of course, it's fodder for unfair prejudices and jokes about, e.g., which department disproportionately attracts sociopaths.)
The replies they sent to emails said "it's OK; please keep or donate the money as you please".
They did in some cases (seven cities in the Czech Republic and Switzerland) then drop by in person to try to retrieve the wallets, but (unless I misunderstood) that's only about 1% of the wallets.
And it is strange almost everyone, including myself, intuits the opposite. Where does this negative view of people come from?
In that vein, I wonder, when the desk clerk received an empty wallet, if they sometimes thought the money had already been taken and they would be blamed.
> Where does this negative view of people come from?
Usually, trust is something which must be earned. When we don't have any information about a person, the default position is one of distrust (pending further information), as the cost of being swindled can be significant. A strange side-effect is that we implicitly assume that most people cannot be trusted.
I'd posit that maybe it's transference from newsworthy cases of loss of property. In burglary cases we read about thieves stealing goods of high-value, so one reasons that the average person is more inclined to steal high-value goods. Whereas the more accurate model is perhaps that most thieves and average people would prefer to steal only what is necessary and convenient, but the value of goods that were not stolen is not reported.
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.
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.
They could always ask their kid or someone they know with a smartphone?
That sounds like something my mother would ask me if (and previously when) she didn’t know how to email someone. Although it’d definitely lower the “conversion” rate regardless given the varying smartphone/PC ownership combined with internet penetration rates.
What if there's no kid though? My MIL lives alone, and this is the kind of thing you can't explain over the phone.
Speaking from experience as we once tried to help her to connect to a open WiFi which needed an OTP-based login via the phone and gave up after about 15 frustrating minutes for all three of us!
It's never easy explaining anything computer related over a phone.
I've noticed working in design that people generally underestimate the average human's ability to solve problems, even if they aren't technically literate. But any increase in the effort department would reduce the amount of returns no doubt.
Yes, they can try many ways to get it done. However, the effort and time that they would pay is indeed diminishing the will to contact the owner. It's not a fair comparison. Even if you give it an email index from world bank, that still doesn't tell how normal citizens' acquaintance in using email.
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.
The world bank tells you half of the Chinese firms have emails but you won't know that far less than that of them ARE WILLING to use it. For taxing, they use super informal wechat group to send around notifications. I doubted if my tax officer remembers his email or has it at all. Regression adjustment or group it as outlier you know the best.
For hotels, I had experience that a 5-star hotel responded my message after almost a month. They have it but not in your way of using it.
Anyway, did you know the reason for their not writing that email?
Super agree. The designer of the experiment really need to read some books. And has him considered the situation that the “wallet” might be returned to the policed station?
May I ask you have investigate those things:1:Does workers in receptions have a email? Is it better to leave multiple communication ways?(as far as I know, net communication is a separate department in China) 2:I realized that you are considering the language problem, why don’t you use local language?(I believe most of your wallets receptors
Understand English, but it’s not meaning they could write a English letter).
3:could u explain why didn’t receive email lead to dishonesty? To Chinese culture, just like japan, leave the lost things in a certain place is a common thing. The real dishonest is: you come back to the desk and can not the wallet back. Chinese is very passive in many ways( I confirmedly admit that), but call it dishonesty is ridiculous，especially you include none of Chinese culture-relative country in the paper.
Funny. I’ve lost mine in Switzerland. Some cash, credit card and driver’s license. Never heard anything back directly or from city’s lost and found. Heard of many with similar experience, not to mention pick pocketing...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Not surprised at all seeing China scoring the lowest.
Many Chinese people would gladly do extreme harm to other people just for personal financial gain, which is unimaginable to foreign people.
Gutter oil, toxic formula, rat meat, etc. Many Chinese people are numb to these selfish actions. The general culture is that people who don't seize the opportunity to take advantage of other people are considered stupid.
You can read similar stories in Victorian Britain and, I'm sure, all other Western countries.
You can also probably find examples today in many countries other than China, including the West.
I think we underestimate the breadth of health and safety regulations, checks, and enforcement that developed in the West to prevent such actions, or at least to catch them as early as possible.
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I think the numbers in reality are a bit worse. I recently lost my wallet, noticed about a minute later and went back - it was already gone. Later someone found it in a trash can, emptied of all money. This happened in Switzerland, which is at the top of this list, and I've heard similar stories before.
436 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 467 ms ] threadEr, did I miss something in the article? What's that got to do with anything?
It's certainly not surprising.
>especially as a bastion of religious freedom
I would not use the word bastion here. Maybe technically it has religious freedom in code, but in practice it tends to be quite poor.
This sort of came to a head when a small child was run over and many pedestrians passed without helping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wang_Yue
So I'm imagining many Chinese people might be reluctant to return a wallet in case it turns out to be some sort of scam.
https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/heres-the-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edited my comment anyway, because I don't want my main account banned from here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
>Wanting to keep the money never incentivizes contact.
It could in combination with the authors' hypothesis of not wanting to view oneself as a thief. Under that condition, the likely behaviour is to simply let the wallet sit in a lost-and-found drawer. Writing the email starts the clock on a license to take it while giving yourself a rationalization.
you don't know if the wallet owner or that original person will turn up and make enquiries as to what happened, and of you just keep the money, there is a real risk your actions being discovered.
whereas at least if you TRY to return the wallet, when you do eventually keep the money, you have an angle of both plausible defense, and arguably, natural justice on your side...
Is that 98% going back to locations that had contacted you? I'd be interested in the figure for returning to locations that didn't contact you, say after a week. But In understand how it could be logistically tricky. Congrats on the paper.
Yes, we only went back for those who contacted us first. Your idea is an interesting one, but it gets at something else (how many people, who otherwise would keep the wallet, instead would turn over the wallet when confronted by the owner). We collected wallets from those who contacted us to rule out the possibility that they are returning the wallets empty.
But in the figure the highest return rate is still below 90%, this just makes me think how do you select the subset to retrive the cash?
"Civic honesty" is, oh, finding five dollars and declaring it as income on your next tax return.
civic: "of or relating to a citizen, a city, citizenship, or community affairs" (merriam-webster).
"Wallets were returned to one of five societal institu- tions: (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."
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.
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.
Say I've lost both a house key and also enough information to, in the current era of scummy personal information aggregation websites, find out my home address, which you can definitely commonly do based on just name and email address and an assumption of local residency. Then regardless of whether I get the key back I should in paranoia change the locks on my house, because now an unscrupulous person who found it easily has a copy of the key and knows exactly where to use it.
So if it's a house key, then in defense it should have no more value to me but has significant (hopefully temporary) value to them.
I'm quite impressed how in most countries, it's a function of empathy vs. how much hassle it is to return things.
Losing a key means changing the locks, the more duplicate keys the higher the cost.
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.
[EDIT] narrowing it down, I'd probably be sadder about the money at $500. So it's somewhere between those numbers.
Without it someone could get a credit based on this ID and you wouldn't have a strong case in court that you didn't take it.
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?
Also I wonder if this was done in big cities like Mexico City (my guess) or more evenly distributed. I have a perception that Mexican society in general is pretty honest, but big cities are more rootless and impersonal. But this didn't seem to apply to India or other high density countries.
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.
Most interesting - the $13/$100 difference.
Notice that in the US and UK, the 'return rate' goes way up when there's $100 in the wallet, but when only $13 it's quite low.
In Switzerland and Sweden, it's high even for $13.
I think there might be a difference between 'core conscientiousness' and 'meaningful conscientiousness'.
In Sweden and Switzerland, it's a matter of propriety to 'return the wallet'. It's appropriate behaviour. They have smaller, tighter communities, you may even know the person. So they 'just do the right thing' because it doesn't matter what's in the wallet.
In the US/UK culture the thinking might be $13 - nobody is care, it's not worth the hassle to report. But as soon as there's money, then it becomes a material matter of conscientiousness, i.e. 'people will miss $100, it's worth the effort to report it'.
I think $13 is just not really enough money, not that much different from $0. It's almost change.
$100 is a nice, meaningful threshold.
Finally, China ... ouch.
Also, the results are perfectly correlated with transparency international index [1]
It's interesting because it may be that 'corruption' is not just a systematic issue in governance, but it may be correlated or predicted with even more basic levels of civic conscientiousness, as measured by tests such as this.
[1] https://www.transparency.org/cpi2018
"There's a reason the authors stopped short of making any social commentary in their study." I think because it would be way out of bounds. Casual commenters such as us have a little space to speculate (unless dang gets fussy), but it'd be too improper for researchers to make assumptions.
One major thing missing in this study is the rural/urban divide. I suggest London is not representative in any way of the rest of the UK, and neither is Manchester the same as Penzance.
Edit: I should note that the authors do indeed go into trying to find cultural correlates, they go right for '% protestant' etc. and make some fairly speculative comments which I would be uncomfortable with because these are all just correlations. Notably, one of the highest 'correlations' is 'latitude' (!), it's not as though being at a certain latitude makes one more civic. Maybe there are other, related, factors, but it's certainly not latitude.
I believe people in China understand very well what paper money is and means, in roughly/ballpark the same terms as Americans.
I could be wrong.
The question is do they store this paper money is wallets? Or is it carried in a pocket? Or do they have full sized binders the money is put in? Or fanny packs? Do they even carry cash anymore?
A 'wallet' in China is the the same thing as a 'wallet' in the USA or Sweden.
Like how women in the US carry purses. I've never been to another country. Do all cultures use purses? If they do is it both genders or only one? I don't know.
I was raised in China and certainly got many of my lost things back growing up. Just because many Chinese folks prefer not to contact the owners directly does not mean they do not use other ways to return lost items :)
this makes it more difficult to get it back than in some of the top rated countries. Do hope to change. But this is not really about civic honesty.
If it was a regular wallet full of useful cards, perhaps some sentimental things like photos etc. then I'd want to get it back to them regardless of whether it contained some cash. I think this experiment might work better with a backpack or a mobile phone.
A grocery list and a business card is hardly 'a wallet'.
Even with $13 ... that's still 'a wallet with some lose change'.
Without credit cards, id, or some some real money, i.e. 'meaningful to the person who lost it', it's an odd measure.
(Owner found me, because the info desk at least wrote down my number)
I like this idea.
Instead of designing things properly (large scale zoning, zoning laws that make sense, building codes to improve the quality of life) we make poor decisions based on cheep and fast; externalize the costs; then make living with those costs a fear/punishment based enforcement.
If "peace officers" were out doing only commonly agreed good things, improving lives rather than being 'tough on crime' then they'd be part of a solution rather than a problem.
I'm Australian and the idea of that blows me away. Like a third-world country. I've seen all the videos of shootings and disgraceful behaviour but I thought those were probably all rare incidents in bad neighbourhoods.
Here in Australia, I've had nothing but professional interactions with our police. I wouldn't hesitate to call them if there was a need or take a lost object to them.
Our laws are certainly heading more and more in a scary direction however.
No, this seems like an unusual perspective in the US especially for something as simple as dropping off a wallet.
Because the cost of being arrested, shot, etc. is quite high, it’s arguably logical to avoid most if not all interactions with them even if the odds of something going wrong seem relatively low, particularly when you have little to nothing to gain from engaging.
Even if you calculate that you’re not at significant personal risk from engaging, it might make sense to do so for other reasons, e.g. in solidarity with others who are targeted unfairly, and/or (plausibility of this aside) to simply attempt to get along without them.
Btw, in both countries there's a rule (at least in Poland it's in the civic law, probably more like a custom in Switzerland), that the person who found your wallet can receive some share (finder's fee) of money, in Poland currently 10%.
It never occurred to me to get it to the Police station. Probably because they never found my wallet when I reported it (and reporting it was a PITA, 2 hours of lot time).
I did not expect China to top the list or anywhere near there, but such cherry picking of data is indeed concerning. By the way, where are South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Singapore? Were these countries/regions (culturally similar to China) also excluded because the data did not fit the authors' expectations?
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.
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.
That must have been a fun study to work on! I wonder how much funding they received for it.
In some nations, stuff just wasn't touched at all for hours.
I didn't think a scientific study would be done on this and published.
[1]https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/suppl/2019/06/19/...
Also, the wallets have a cost too, so it is not only the equivalent of $13 being lost in some cases.
They did in some cases (seven cities in the Czech Republic and Switzerland) then drop by in person to try to retrieve the wallets, but (unless I misunderstood) that's only about 1% of the wallets.
And it is strange almost everyone, including myself, intuits the opposite. Where does this negative view of people come from?
In that vein, I wonder, when the desk clerk received an empty wallet, if they sometimes thought the money had already been taken and they would be blamed.
Usually, trust is something which must be earned. When we don't have any information about a person, the default position is one of distrust (pending further information), as the cost of being swindled can be significant. A strange side-effect is that we implicitly assume that most people cannot be trusted.
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.
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.
That sounds like something my mother would ask me if (and previously when) she didn’t know how to email someone. Although it’d definitely lower the “conversion” rate regardless given the varying smartphone/PC ownership combined with internet penetration rates.
Speaking from experience as we once tried to help her to connect to a open WiFi which needed an OTP-based login via the phone and gave up after about 15 frustrating minutes for all three of us!
I've noticed working in design that people generally underestimate the average human's ability to solve problems, even if they aren't technically literate. But any increase in the effort department would reduce the amount of returns no doubt.
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.
For hotels, I had experience that a 5-star hotel responded my message after almost a month. They have it but not in your way of using it.
Anyway, did you know the reason for their not writing that email?
Pics: Fig S1 @ https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/suppl/2019/06/19/...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gutter oil, toxic formula, rat meat, etc. Many Chinese people are numb to these selfish actions. The general culture is that people who don't seize the opportunity to take advantage of other people are considered stupid.
You can also probably find examples today in many countries other than China, including the West.
I think we underestimate the breadth of health and safety regulations, checks, and enforcement that developed in the West to prevent such actions, or at least to catch them as early as possible.
Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here. That also means not using HN primarily for political battle, which it looks like your account has been doing recently.