That'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.
Lines 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.
Russia and Romania, as compared to the US, are known for dishonesty in some other areas: corruption and bribery in the government, cheating in schools and universities, counterfeit goods, financial fraud, tax evasion, etc. So it might be surprising to see honesty when it comes to returning a lost wallet.
(I think the important difference might be "being dishonest to the system" vs. "being dishonest to a concrete individual in your community".)
I'd point out selfishness has different dimensions.
When Chinese people get egoism and selfish behavior pointed out (in contexts where this could happen to soneome of any ethnicity) frequently they'll tell you it is oriented around their family and not their "self". That is a circle of concern bigger than your "self" but can also be an extension of the self and certainly can draw people away from being supportive of the community.
That's a bit vague, though. On the one hand, there is most definitely a prioritization of love and concern (close family comes before extended family, and onward, all the way up to the entire human species according to principles of subsidiarity), so you have a moral obligation to prioritize those closer to you, all else remaining equal.
But you don't get to intentionally (undesirable side effects can be permissible) commit evil acts against people of less concern (like robbing your neighbor to send your kid to college) for the sake of people of greater concern (or vice versa, of course). That's how the mafia operates. It's analogous to the difference between patriotism (the healthy and obligatory love of and concern for one's own nation) and chauvinism (the idolatrous and narcissistic "love" of one's own nation coupled with contempt and condescension for other nations).
Honestly USA is seen as an individualistic country and by extension its citizens as selfish. Total opposite of Eastern European countries like Romania and Russia.
On the contrary I think it fits most of the USA save for maybe the Southern States. As an Eastern European myself I'm interested in knowing excactly which stereotypes Americans hold. They might be mostly true as well.
The problem with measuring USA, China, Russia is that they are so large and diverse that you'll get very different results depending on where you are. It would be like saying "Europe". Apparently, they used the largest 5 cities in each country, which I suppose helps make for more comparable results. But for example in Texas I'd expect the results of San Antonio/Austin/Dallas to be significantly different (they are culturally) even though they are only separated by only a few hundred km.
However, I can say in the US one of the biggest differences is just rural vs urban. The likelihood of things disappearing in cities vs towns is higher, I suspect because fewer people know each other. I'd also say that changes over time are fairly dramatic. Many people in the US didn't lock cars or homes until the 80s and 90s or even 00s.
> The problem with measuring USA, China, Russia is that they are so large and diverse that you'll get very different results depending on where you are. It would be like saying "Europe".
No it wouldn’t, not for the US. Europe has 50 different countries and 24 official languages. The US has two widespread languages and apparently has so little cultural variety that you can move across the country without any major culture shocks (at least I haven’t heard any).
It could sometimes make sense to, at a distance, talk about certain regions like a monolith, like for example Scandinavia. But it makes no sense to talk about Belgium and Greece in the same sentence.
> However, I can say in the US one of the biggest differences is just rural vs urban.
Interestingly people often generalize “Europe” based on what happens in the handful of 4 million+ cities.
Hmm, is this why there are subtitles on reality TV shows based in the south? Suburbia is fairly uniform, but not so much the urban or rural areas.
I would expect culture shock between NY and Dallas, Seattle and Atlanta, much less Salt Lake and Boston. I can get Cajun drawl, but not Southie without a fair bit (not quite Glasgow levels) of concentration.
You should visit. A dialect that millions of people speak separated by thousands of km, income, and livelihood is not equivalent to the language difference between Swiss Cantons, it's closer to the difference between Lombardi and Napoli. Just look at the driving, forget language.
At the same time, we're one of the most volunteering and charitable countries. But, I think civility is decreasing --be that due to economic conditions, mass pop culture or demographics.
Perhaps you misunderstand the point of the charitable tax deduction then. Expenditures/investments made in society can easily sidestep the public good if we don’t find a way to tax them. But charitable money has the public good built in (enforced by the specific types of activities that can be registered as 501c3) so the tax is not necessary
As a Romanian, I completely agree. The US does need a bit more civic spirit that can't be generated from market incentives -- it needs to be indoctrinated so to speak from a young age.
I would suspect that choosing five major cities in the US doesn't make for a representative sample, and you could end up with wildly different overall results depending on which five cities you chose.
That 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.
I 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."
This 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.
They'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.
Astronomy 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.
Social 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.
Neither is a lot of physical science. You might be forgetting that biology is a natural science, or that scientific fields like astrobiology exist where nothing at all has been shown yet in terms of life outside Earth, or that physics doesn’t know exactly how much dark matter & energy there is or even how gravity really works.
And anyway, that’s all irrelevant because science is not defined by whether the results are exact or high precision or even highly reproducible. You seem to have a mistaken impression of what science means. If you are a curious person, it is really useful to understand how science is defined, and you can verify that social sciences are still science, and find out why social sciences really are sciences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science
Math and logic are the fields that some people consider to be not science, because they’re not based on observing and analyzing.
It doesn't matter what some self-proclaimed intellectuals define as "science". There is a difference between social "sciences" and STEM that make it important to be distinguished and it's unfair, and even dangerous to give social sciences the same credibility. I don't think it will be productive if I cite some websites in this comment since you can just google my point of view and will more or less find the same arguments.
Okay, I googled your claim, here’s what I get for the prompt “is social science a science?”
“Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies.”
What are you even talking about now? Sure there is a difference between social science and, say, physics, which is why they have two different names. Yes they are different subjects. They are both branches of science though. Why are you moving your own goal posts? You weren’t arguing earlier that “there is a difference” between social science. You were arguing that social science is not science, which is false.
I don’t know why you think casting doubt on Wikipedia using ad-hominem tactics is a good idea. That’s a pretty weak argument, you can do better.
And why did you bring up STEM? Only the S stand for science. Technology, Engineering and Math are all not science primarily because they’re not primarily based on experimentation and observation. They involve some science here and there, but they are not considered science disciplines.
It actually might be much more productive to cite some websites, especially if they’re actually trustworthy, than to claim someone somewhere agrees with you without providing any evidence at all. Let’s do some actual science on this question. I’ve given you two pieces of evidence that are widely trusted and widely cited, one of which was your suggestion. Now you give me two pieces of evidence that back up your claim that social science is not science.
On psychology https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-xpm-2012-jul-13-la-ol-blo... "But to claim it is “science” is inaccurate. Actually, it’s worse than that. It’s an attempt to redefine science. Science, redefined, is no longer the empirical analysis of the natural world; instead, it is any topic that sprinkles a few numbers around. This is dangerous because, under such a loose definition, anything can qualify as science. And when anything qualifies as science, science can no longer claim to have a unique grasp on secular truth."
You know that “humanities” and “psychology” are not social science, right? Your first two links, and the quote you chose, are not even talking about social science.
Your third link doesn’t actually argue that social science isn’t a science, it’s just a plea to be more careful, which is fine and fair. The title of this piece fits Betteridge’s law of headlines: the question (‘is “social science” an oxymoron?’) can clearly be answered with a “no”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines Also many of the commenters on that piece disagree with the article and have some valid points that this opinion piece is lacking in robustness and factual accuracy.
So it seems like you’ve only linked to 3 opinion pieces by individuals, none of which actually back up your claim that social science is not a science, and for which there is little evidence of any widespread agreement, as opposed to Google’s dictionary definition of social science or the Wikipedia article on social science (that comes with over 3 dozen references) that I linked to. (BTW go ahead and look up any dictionary definition - OED & Merriam Webster both confirm that social science is a science.) I did search ‘why is social science not a science’ (which BTW is a biased priming question that presumes an answer - you can get lots of false information from Google this way), and the front page of results is a mix of opinion pieces, lots of articles that don’t actually challenge whether it’s a science, and pieces that flat-out contradict the question and confirm that social science is a science.
I do think there’s a stronger argument to be made here to maybe kind-of half support your point of view, but you’re not yet convincing me or anyone else here that social science isn’t doing science, you’re only providing repeated evidence that you don’t really know what either science is or what social science is. The reason your comments closer to the top got flagged is because they’re actually false.
Well, I guess like the rest of your comments, your impression is wrong and you’re making assumptions and jumping to unsupported conclusions. I read all three articles in their entirety, and the comments under them. They simply don’t back up your claim about social science vs science.
Why do you believe people downvoting you work in social science, what actual evidence do you have for that? I would love to see that, I want to know how to identify the jobs and motivations of people responding to me.
I don't think I'm wrong otherwise I'd stop arguing with you. But you insist stubbornly that I'm wrong without providing any good arguments.
Regarding the downvoting, I don't have evidence for it, but you don't have evidence for your version either. My assumption is that you for some reason see the need to uphold social science as a science, and anything against that narration must be wrong automatically.
Aww come on, you can do better than this, I know you can. The ad-hominems are weak. Defend science with evidence and not assumption. Assume you might be wrong, and prove yourself right. The argument you’re attempting to make is older than both of us put together, and the talking points you’re repeating are well worn (and for the most part have lost the test of time), but there is still ample material out there. I’ve been giving you hints that there is a valid argument to make, but this isn’t it.
What is science? Please define it. What is social science? What does a social scientist do, and why doesn’t it amount to science in your mind? What does a biologist do differently?
Now answer this question carefully: why do so many people call it a science if it’s not? Why does social science have science in the name? Why do all the encyclopedias and dictionaries all define social science as a science, if you’re right? Why do you believe you know better than the experts that I’ve linked to? Things that might clarify the discussion include: why is it important to you to state that social science is not a field of science? What harm do you believe is being done by calling social science a science?
You’ve argued that social science is not a science because it’s not exact, but the natural sciences are not exact. You’ve argued that science seeks to explain things based on observation and analysis, but social science does exactly that. You’ve argued that social science is “different” from STEM, which is circular (The S stands for the same science that occurs in the term “social science”) and pointing at the existence of some unspecified differences doesn’t do a single thing to demonstrate that social science is not a science or is failing to use the scientific method.
Look you get on my nerves with your tone. If you want to have a conversation thats fine, but if your message starts with Aww you are not worth my time.
Oh I’m sorry. Honestly. I do want to have a conversation. Is it possible you might have misinterpreted my “tone”? I was just trying to be encouraging and break the downward spiral of ad-hominem snark here, to get back to having a discussion about the issue rather than complaining about style. There is a valid argument to be made, and you’re failing to make it. It’s abundantly clear now that you are either unable or unwilling to respond to any of my argument at all (you have completely ignored every single direct point and question about what science is, what the definition of science is, and what social science is, and so far you’ve refused to even define the terms you’re making claims about - this isn’t helping your case). You did give me 3 opinion rants, but you haven’t provided any particularly relevant or compelling evidence of your claim that social science is not a science. And the fact of the matter is that social science is currently categorized as a branch of science, regardless of your opinion. I’m curious what your expertise is, and I’m curious where you got this opinion and why you keep it in the face of contrary evidence like the dictionary. I would have loved to come to a conclusion that recognizes there’s actually some nuance here, because there is, but I’m happy to call it here if you want since I have evidence that you don’t actually seem to want to discuss the issue you brought up.
Good. Would you mind reviewing the thread and answering some of the many questions I’ve asked that you haven’t answered?
Specifically, for one, please define “science”, so we can get to the question of what is and what is not science. The claim that social science is not science is yours to justify.
A list of social sciences is in the Wikipedia article I linked to already. Sociology and Anthropology would be good representative examples.
I define science as anything that is scientifically rigorous. That does not include humanities or social sciences, arts, philosophy, history etc.
Social science is not a science (I could agree on field of study) because there are too many possibilities involved in human psyche. "“Many researchers fail to consider that their measurements of brains, behavior and self-reported experience are profoundly influenced by their subjects' culture, class and experience, as well as by the situation in which the research is conducted,”"
An example of how social science can be dangerous is of how many people take the "Milgram experiment
" canon, Eugenics, IQ, Social Darwinism, ... policy making based on social science studies .. It all goes into the same basket to me.
> I define science as anything that is scientifically rigorous
That's not a definition, it's a circular statement with no information. Please provide a real and functional definition that can be used to identify whether a subject is scientifically rigorous or not.
Your first link confirms that Anthropology is science.
Your second link is false information content spam with no sources. People can and do experiment on society, the article we're commenting on is an example, the claim highlighted is obviously false.
Your third link is outdated non-news - the AAA put the word science back in their statement the following year.
Your fourth link is talking about humanities and not social science.
This is another Gish Gallop of non-evidence that fails to support your claim.
How many possibilities are involved in the stars or the earth or in chemistry or biology? Why does the number of possibilities have anything to do with whether a subject is science or not? Please explain.
Here's a list of research papers from multiple fields, some are scientific and some are not. Can you identify which ones are not science and which field they belong to? If it’s not science, say why.
> That's not a definition, it's a circular statement with no information.
Common man do you want me to copy-paste the definition of science from wikipedia here? You can look it up yourself. My obvious statement is that the problem I see is that some stuff that people want to label as science is not science because it is not rigorous enough.
> Common man do you want me to copy-paste the definition of science from wikipedia here? You can look it up yourself.
Sure. I already did that, and you disagreed with it. WP’s definition supports social science being categorized as science. I’m asking you for the definition that supports your claim, because WP’s does not.
> You can read in the article that people do not agree on whether anthropology is science or not.
You can read in it that some do. The conclusion says that at least some of it is good robust science, which disproves your claim.
> Well here we run into a problem, anything that you don't want to hear is either spam or false information.
Not true at all. Did you even bother to read the article and look at whether it’s authoritative? Yourarticlelibrary.com is a content spam site: the entire thing. Did you even read the article? It’s full of misspellings and false and stupid sentences. The problem is you aren’t even trying to evaluate the quality of the links you’re pasting, after googling a biased question for anything to back up your incorrect points. I’d be absolutely embarrassed to defend this article, and you should too, it’s trash. Your response is resorting again to ad-hominem, you simply don’t seem to be capable of sticking to arguing that the content is true or think critically about it.
I know that people argue about this topic, I’ve in fact mentioned that multiple times. Too bad that doesn’t prove anything.
I’m glad you agree that some of those are science, because all of them except the math paper are categorized as social science. Every Single One. The math paper is not science, it’s math.
You’re proving to me you don’t know what you’re talking about, and not curious to learn.
> Sure. I already did that, and you disagreed with it. WP’s definition supports social science being categorized as science. I’m asking you for the definition that supports your claim, because WP’s does not.
Okay so social sciences I do not consider science because they are not rigorous enough (I did write this in the past three messages...). The rest of the WP 1st paragraph I agree with.
> You can read in it that some do. The conclusion says that at least some of it is good robust science, which disproves your claim.
I did not send you the link to prove my claim. But you can derivate from this that there is no consensus on this topic. You'll probably argue that it is a closed topic because wikipedia says so, but I do not agree.
> Not true at all. Did you even bother to read the article and look at whether it’s authoritative? Yourarticlelibrary.com is a content spam site: the entire thing. Did you even read the article? It’s full of misspellings and false and stupid sentences. The problem is you aren’t even trying to evaluate the quality of the links you’re pasting, after googling a biased question for anything to back up your incorrect points. I’d be absolutely embarrassed to defend this article, and you should too, it’s trash. Your response is resorting again to ad-hominem, you simply don’t seem to be capable of sticking to arguing that the content is true or think critically about it.
If you want I can mark for you the texts that I consider truthful.
> I know that people argue about this topic, I’ve in fact mentioned that multiple times. Too bad that doesn’t prove anything.
What are you trying to prove? Who decides that social science is a science?
> I’m glad you agree that some of those are science, because all of them except the math paper are categorized as social science. Every Single One. The math paper is not science, it’s math.
Hydrology < Multidisciplinary but mostly Natural Science
Computer Science < Formal Sciences
Sorry but you seem to be quite wrong on this one. The only credit I could give you is on multidisciplinary sciences, but there again I would exclude social sciences as valid parts of the respective science. Mathematics is often considered a science.
> You’re proving to me you don’t know what you’re talking about, and not curious to learn.
Do you want to hear my opinion of what I think about you? I think you are proclaiming a false sense of intellectualism by being pendant where it is absolutely unnecessary. I've already stated my point of view multiple times and it is simple enough that you should understand me. You do understand my point of view but continue to inquire information from me as if to show me a lesson. I have the feeling we continue in circles so unless there is something else to tell I'd like to close the topic.
What’s “rigorous enough”? What does “rigorous” actually mean? You haven’t defined that at all in any way that can explain how to distinguish between social science and science. How does “rigor” separate biology from anthropology?
I’m just trying to get you to be even a little bit rigorous, but you haven’t been able to put any rigor behind your claim whatsoever, you seem unable to argue your claim, because you simply keep repeating it. You’ve resorted to ad-hominem instead of discussing the issue in most of your comments in this thread, and you’re doing it again.
The evidence you’ve provided of a so-called “debate” over whether social science is a science is incredibly weak. Most of it was irrelevant to your specific point because either you’re confused about the difference between humanities and social science or you read the click-bait headline but didn’t catch the conclusion. Most of what you brought so far was single obscure opinion pieces by one person that fail to show any significant disagreement about social science. The existence of someone who says something hyperbolic on the internet is not evidence of a lack of consensus.
Meanwhile, the single Wikipedia link stating without hesitation that social science is considered a science represents thousands of people who agree that social science is a science. Wikipedia is generally pretty good about acknowledging a lack of consensus. So if you think you’re right that there’s enough lack of consensus, then you should edit the Wikipedia page and get it to permanently state either a lack of consensus or permanently state that social science isn’t science.
Yes totally I think you should scour Puja Mondal’s “article” to pick out the sentences that are true among the many sentences that are untrue. Maybe doing that exercise would help you see how hopelessly terrible that article is. I’m stunned you’re doubling down on this particular point. What is the value of some true sentences in an opinion article that has many false statements, and is written by someone with no expertise?
BTW I didn’t define those papers as social science, the science journals nature, science and PNAS did. (For example https://www.nature.com/collections/ccjddcabab) Agriculture, being a human endeavor, is considered part social science, and any given paper can lean heavily into the social science. The paper you called CS is really computational social science, and obviously so since it’s trying to recognize human emotion. All the papers listed are multidisciplinary and all involve social science. You are further demonstrating that you don’t know what social science is.
So what’s your expertise? Why is your opinion on social science even relevant?
If your epistemology does not allow you to have posteriors different from priors based on this information, it is going to model the world poorly. That's okay. It is not a sin to model the world poorly.
But it is a sin to transmit your disease to others knowingly. No one is interested in broken epistemology.
The first time any experiment is done it hasn't been reproduced. The SI provides detailed information on experiment design, you're free to undertake your own reproduction effort.
I really wish we'd make a word that distinguishes the difference without adding the word 'science' at all.
Saying social 'science', gives the credibility of science.
Heck, I'd really like a scale that can measure the credibility. P values are a bandaid.
For instance, chemistry is pretty solid science right? Well, if you make polyurethane in a box, the 'same way' each time, you are going to have bubbles in seemingly random locations, with maybe some correlation. Whatever the case, its not perfectly repeatable due to macro scale complexities.
I don't think this would do too much for the scientific community, because most are aware. But I do think it would help teenagers understand the difference.
I cringe whenever I hear things like "But it was peer reviewed and in this fancy journal". Yeah give me replication and I'll take a look.
Medicine, biology, and even quantum physics could be argued to not be science by your standard because they often aren't explicitly deterministic. The authors are using the scientific method to evaluate population differences. How else would one undertake this analysis?
The 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.
Lots of brown ones, evidently: //en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland
I think the issue is that if you create an economically and culturally hostile environment, it prevents assimilation. It doesn't matter what your race, religion etc. is at that point. Recall the state of Irish immigrants in the early U.S., that's where the meme "paddy wagon" results from.
I 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.
Actually 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.
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.
I have lost things, or have forgotten and left minor things at various places (e.g., mom & pop food courts, shops) in Taiwan. They were insignificant in the scheme of things, and in some cases the return was more expensive than the forgotten item. Yet, they found ways to get them back to me. (A BIC four color pen?!)
This is diametrically opposite what I experienced on the mainland.
Important 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.
Underrated 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.
Looks 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.
Indeed, 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.
This 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.
If 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?
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.
Amazing 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?
I 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.
I 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.
yes! 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.
Ha, 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.
NYC. Chicago. Detroit. Atlanta. This ain't it chief. There is no correlation between "fewer guns" and "more petty theft". The common factor is culture of crime and it comes in different flavors. There are countries in Europe that completely outlawed even pistol ownership without extensive classes and expensive licenses, and yet they're some of the safest countries in the world. Has to do with culture and general population hostility, and the tensions and hostility will always naturally be higher among the armed population as been proved by history time and time again.
Is not relevant probably. This kind of crime is 100% opportunistic and normally collaborative. Done by specialized gangs that came attracted to touristic areas like sharks by the blood. Being from a different country is not uncommon.
In any case touristic areas show a distorted reflect on the honesty of the country. Honesty is directly proportional to stability. Work in touristic areas is seasonary and unstable
I don't really care about either side of the gun debate. I'm most annoyed with how much people care about it when its a tiny fraction of deaths and less than 1% if you remove suicides.
Meanwhile as I age, the number of healthcare/medical related problems become more real.
Few people talk about obesity being a problem, Fewer talk about the other 50% of causes of death.
Wondering how you think that. As far as I can see people talk about obesity all the time. Unfortunately it’s not a solved problem at population levels yet.
it's not uncommon for open carry states to have lock boxes inside the entrance of government buildings for people to stow their firearms. i haven't personally seen it other places (i.e. museums), but it's actually a thing
no museum in Europe tells you to please leave your guns at the entrance to pick them up later
Although in Plovdiv, an ancient Roman historical site accessed by stairs down on a busy shopping street, does have a sign explicitly indicating that you shouldn't take your guns in (also no dogs, no smoking); https://goo.gl/maps/ucGTpQQNwxK8hCMi6
It's funny how times have changed. I remember public safety videos on British Airways when you would fly into New York, before you landed, they'd play a 5-minute clip about how dangerous it is and how to keep your wallet safe. As I recall it was in English and Japanese... but I was very young so maybe I'm not remembering perfectly.
From personal experience, non-confrontational petty theft in Europe tends to be an issue only in high density high tourist areas. So no wonder it can have weird contrast with civic metrics
It would be interesting to submit petty theft to a similar cultural analysis that this article uses. Neither NYC nor the aforementioned European cities are ethnically/culturally homogeneous. A study like this could either corroborate the findings of this article, or introduce an interesting dimension to the analysis, something non-trivial.
NYC is 1 city. Europe is 50 countries. To say you broadly generalized is to understate by a mile. Let's narrow it down to high density mixed cities like Paris or Berlin and you may be onto something, but in reality you also have to be in a bad part of Berlin, or a particularly high density tourist area. Most cities and countries overall in Europe are completely safe. Most are actually much safer than even notoriously safe US cities.
Anecdotally I heard this from many unrelated people about Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona (heard similar about London and major UK cities but that's mostly from stories online). Basically all your typical big Western European cities. Pretty level with NYC.
It's a stark contrast with big cities in parts of Asia where I go. Sometimes I'm toying with an idea of moving to Europe but apart from troubles getting digital nomad visa petty crime is also a thing that scares me.
(However it's not generally supported by published crime stats so I'm not 100% sure whether to be worried)
> However it's not generally supported by published crime stats so I'm not 100% sure whether to be worried
You should not. There is some level of crime anywhere, but big cities have become much safer than they used to be, at least in the West. Shit still happens sometimes, but there is no reason to be worried if you have a reasonable behaviour. I know of a couple of people who got their phone stolen or who had a burglary, but many more who lost wallets by dropping or forgetting them somewhere.
If you are comparing from the US to Europe, the crime and how concerned you should be is absolutely night and day. I've lived in SF, DC, SLC, and San Diego in the U.S. and Berlin, London, and Tallinn in Europe with plenty of time spent in Paris and elsewhere and I have never felt outright scared in any European city. Are there parts of them I wouldn't be comfortable in at night? Sure, same with any big city, but the lack of gun crime and better social safety net means a lot fewer mentally ill people and a lot fewer people with easy access to a firearm. And just overall, I always felt far safer in Europe (which I can't quantify, just a vibe), even as a tourist. That said, having lived in Beijing for a bit I would guess it is technically safer there, you just are living in a panopticon.
I wasn't talking about China, plenty places I would feel unsafe as a foreigner due to xenophobia. Panopticon thing is similarly bad yeah. Imagine how bad it would be without CCTVs.
I mean cities in other countries, without such a central CCTV network but still safe. Walk with XL sized phone hanging out from your back pocket in city centre safe. If you can do it in Paris (or leave your laptop in a cafe while you go pee) then sure.
But I read a story how phone was snatched out from guy's hands at a crossing in central London so I doubt it. I use phone while walking a lot so in Europe I should better be rich enough I can buy a new one easily.
Pickpockets - This is one of the most common crimes happening in the city. ALWAYS watch your personal belongings and if possible don't carry unneeded cash with you or any important documents such as passports or IDs. Be very wary in the metro especially during rush hour (if possible have your bag in front of you) and Times Square, which is a hotspot for pickpockets. Also, be on the lookout for outright muggings.
if you are travelling, getting pickpocketed is a huge hassle, so telling tourists to be careful makes sense (not to mention, tourists bring their wallets out a lot, and stand slackjawed looking at things).
But living in NYC, riding the subway, and walking through Times Sq on the regular (NYC's 25 screen multiplex is there, across the street from a 13 screen) I never heard of anybody getting pickpocketed.
USA is big. Europe is big. Really depends on which part of Europe you speak of. Norway is probably the most peaceful country in the world, next to NZ, from my subjective perspective. Also do not just listen to what "Everyone" tells you, reality is most often more nuanced than the information spread of provocations and rumor.
> No one tells you to pin your pockets shut when you visit NYC.
When I took my family from Brazil to visit Orlando, every single person and tourism agency told me to do just that (and hide the money out of pockets).
I imagine they do that for NYC too. Looks like a universal rule that wherever you go there will pickpockets specialized in tourists.
YMMV also depending of who you are. In China, I look like a tourist, so pickpockets have a field trip with me, they don't even bother to be discreet.
In Paris, I never had a problem, because I look local. But my mother from the country side actually got troubles, because she looked like an easy prey, despite take much more care about her sutff than I do.
Gangster-style yakuza rarely bother normal people. It’s not worth the trouble for either party. There are some industries with a lot of yakuza-owned and operated companies, but their main goal is to make or lose legitimate money, so unless you are aware of some tells you’d never know that they are yakuza.
I 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?
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.
I 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.
> 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.
Replacing Home Depot-style locks in Home Depot-style doors is extremely easy, it’s only a couple of minutes of work using only basic tools. Maybe up to 30 minutes if you’re doing it for the first time, and forgot where you put your screwdriver.
It 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.
I live on the west coast of the US. When we say 'change the locks' we don't really mean changing out the physical locks for new ones. We mean having them re-keyed. It's not very expensive, and contrary to your anecdote, there are locksmiths everywhere here. A lot of them have no storefront, they are entirely mobile (and a fair bit of the time, unmarked vans). Storefronts still exist, but much of the regular interaction consumers have with keys these days is easily handled at the local home improvement stores.
Here in Sweden everyone uses Yale style locks and it’s super trivial and cheap to change just the barrel bit inside the lock. Everyone can do it themselves in a few minutes and there are no locksmiths about.
Not entirely according to my experience, the simple Assa Abloys are indeed rather cheap and easy to change. But the more secure, thus approved by insurance, can be tricky since they contain traps.
There are instruction available on how to change them, but even me, and I am not afraid of DIY, called one of the many locksmiths around here in Stockholm.
My 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.
Definitely 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.
This 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.
Complete 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
We 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.
> 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) 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.
(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.
Not 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.
One 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).
It'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.
Important 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.
It'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.
Super 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.
There'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.
190 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadI 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.
(I think the important difference might be "being dishonest to the system" vs. "being dishonest to a concrete individual in your community".)
When Chinese people get egoism and selfish behavior pointed out (in contexts where this could happen to soneome of any ethnicity) frequently they'll tell you it is oriented around their family and not their "self". That is a circle of concern bigger than your "self" but can also be an extension of the self and certainly can draw people away from being supportive of the community.
But you don't get to intentionally (undesirable side effects can be permissible) commit evil acts against people of less concern (like robbing your neighbor to send your kid to college) for the sake of people of greater concern (or vice versa, of course). That's how the mafia operates. It's analogous to the difference between patriotism (the healthy and obligatory love of and concern for one's own nation) and chauvinism (the idolatrous and narcissistic "love" of one's own nation coupled with contempt and condescension for other nations).
However, I can say in the US one of the biggest differences is just rural vs urban. The likelihood of things disappearing in cities vs towns is higher, I suspect because fewer people know each other. I'd also say that changes over time are fairly dramatic. Many people in the US didn't lock cars or homes until the 80s and 90s or even 00s.
No it wouldn’t, not for the US. Europe has 50 different countries and 24 official languages. The US has two widespread languages and apparently has so little cultural variety that you can move across the country without any major culture shocks (at least I haven’t heard any).
It could sometimes make sense to, at a distance, talk about certain regions like a monolith, like for example Scandinavia. But it makes no sense to talk about Belgium and Greece in the same sentence.
> However, I can say in the US one of the biggest differences is just rural vs urban.
Interestingly people often generalize “Europe” based on what happens in the handful of 4 million+ cities.
I would expect culture shock between NY and Dallas, Seattle and Atlanta, much less Salt Lake and Boston. I can get Cajun drawl, but not Southie without a fair bit (not quite Glasgow levels) of concentration.
There are (sometimes, rarely) subtitles on Norwegian TV for Norwegian dialects. Doesn’t make it diverse (homogeneous as Americans like to say).
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.
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.
And anyway, that’s all irrelevant because science is not defined by whether the results are exact or high precision or even highly reproducible. You seem to have a mistaken impression of what science means. If you are a curious person, it is really useful to understand how science is defined, and you can verify that social sciences are still science, and find out why social sciences really are sciences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science
Math and logic are the fields that some people consider to be not science, because they’re not based on observing and analyzing.
“Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies.”
What are you even talking about now? Sure there is a difference between social science and, say, physics, which is why they have two different names. Yes they are different subjects. They are both branches of science though. Why are you moving your own goal posts? You weren’t arguing earlier that “there is a difference” between social science. You were arguing that social science is not science, which is false.
I don’t know why you think casting doubt on Wikipedia using ad-hominem tactics is a good idea. That’s a pretty weak argument, you can do better.
And why did you bring up STEM? Only the S stand for science. Technology, Engineering and Math are all not science primarily because they’re not primarily based on experimentation and observation. They involve some science here and there, but they are not considered science disciplines.
It actually might be much more productive to cite some websites, especially if they’re actually trustworthy, than to claim someone somewhere agrees with you without providing any evidence at all. Let’s do some actual science on this question. I’ve given you two pieces of evidence that are widely trusted and widely cited, one of which was your suggestion. Now you give me two pieces of evidence that back up your claim that social science is not science.
This one I had saved somewhere https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literally-psyched/human...
On psychology https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-xpm-2012-jul-13-la-ol-blo... "But to claim it is “science” is inaccurate. Actually, it’s worse than that. It’s an attempt to redefine science. Science, redefined, is no longer the empirical analysis of the natural world; instead, it is any topic that sprinkles a few numbers around. This is dangerous because, under such a loose definition, anything can qualify as science. And when anything qualifies as science, science can no longer claim to have a unique grasp on secular truth."
And excuse me if I allow myself to add a 3rd one https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-social-s...
Your third link doesn’t actually argue that social science isn’t a science, it’s just a plea to be more careful, which is fine and fair. The title of this piece fits Betteridge’s law of headlines: the question (‘is “social science” an oxymoron?’) can clearly be answered with a “no”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines Also many of the commenters on that piece disagree with the article and have some valid points that this opinion piece is lacking in robustness and factual accuracy.
So it seems like you’ve only linked to 3 opinion pieces by individuals, none of which actually back up your claim that social science is not a science, and for which there is little evidence of any widespread agreement, as opposed to Google’s dictionary definition of social science or the Wikipedia article on social science (that comes with over 3 dozen references) that I linked to. (BTW go ahead and look up any dictionary definition - OED & Merriam Webster both confirm that social science is a science.) I did search ‘why is social science not a science’ (which BTW is a biased priming question that presumes an answer - you can get lots of false information from Google this way), and the front page of results is a mix of opinion pieces, lots of articles that don’t actually challenge whether it’s a science, and pieces that flat-out contradict the question and confirm that social science is a science.
I do think there’s a stronger argument to be made here to maybe kind-of half support your point of view, but you’re not yet convincing me or anyone else here that social science isn’t doing science, you’re only providing repeated evidence that you don’t really know what either science is or what social science is. The reason your comments closer to the top got flagged is because they’re actually false.
My comment closer to the top got flagged because some people who work in social "science" don't like it if someone tells them the truth.
Why do you believe people downvoting you work in social science, what actual evidence do you have for that? I would love to see that, I want to know how to identify the jobs and motivations of people responding to me.
Regarding the downvoting, I don't have evidence for it, but you don't have evidence for your version either. My assumption is that you for some reason see the need to uphold social science as a science, and anything against that narration must be wrong automatically.
What is science? Please define it. What is social science? What does a social scientist do, and why doesn’t it amount to science in your mind? What does a biologist do differently?
Now answer this question carefully: why do so many people call it a science if it’s not? Why does social science have science in the name? Why do all the encyclopedias and dictionaries all define social science as a science, if you’re right? Why do you believe you know better than the experts that I’ve linked to? Things that might clarify the discussion include: why is it important to you to state that social science is not a field of science? What harm do you believe is being done by calling social science a science?
You’ve argued that social science is not a science because it’s not exact, but the natural sciences are not exact. You’ve argued that science seeks to explain things based on observation and analysis, but social science does exactly that. You’ve argued that social science is “different” from STEM, which is circular (The S stands for the same science that occurs in the term “social science”) and pointing at the existence of some unspecified differences doesn’t do a single thing to demonstrate that social science is not a science or is failing to use the scientific method.
What if we tried an approach with examples. What field as example is a social science to you?
Specifically, for one, please define “science”, so we can get to the question of what is and what is not science. The claim that social science is not science is yours to justify.
A list of social sciences is in the Wikipedia article I linked to already. Sociology and Anthropology would be good representative examples.
https://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/sociology/sociology-is-so....
http://cognitionandculture.net/blogs/benson-salers-blog/anth...
https://etiennefd.substack.com/p/the-difference-between-scie...
I define science as anything that is scientifically rigorous. That does not include humanities or social sciences, arts, philosophy, history etc.
Social science is not a science (I could agree on field of study) because there are too many possibilities involved in human psyche. "“Many researchers fail to consider that their measurements of brains, behavior and self-reported experience are profoundly influenced by their subjects' culture, class and experience, as well as by the situation in which the research is conducted,”"
An example of how social science can be dangerous is of how many people take the "Milgram experiment " canon, Eugenics, IQ, Social Darwinism, ... policy making based on social science studies .. It all goes into the same basket to me.
That's not a definition, it's a circular statement with no information. Please provide a real and functional definition that can be used to identify whether a subject is scientifically rigorous or not.
Your first link confirms that Anthropology is science. Your second link is false information content spam with no sources. People can and do experiment on society, the article we're commenting on is an example, the claim highlighted is obviously false. Your third link is outdated non-news - the AAA put the word science back in their statement the following year. Your fourth link is talking about humanities and not social science.
This is another Gish Gallop of non-evidence that fails to support your claim.
How many possibilities are involved in the stars or the earth or in chemistry or biology? Why does the number of possibilities have anything to do with whether a subject is science or not? Please explain.
Here's a list of research papers from multiple fields, some are scientific and some are not. Can you identify which ones are not science and which field they belong to? If it’s not science, say why.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26131-z
https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.17207
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2220570120
https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.12597
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33957-8
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add5462
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.02820
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26560-w
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300166120
Common man do you want me to copy-paste the definition of science from wikipedia here? You can look it up yourself. My obvious statement is that the problem I see is that some stuff that people want to label as science is not science because it is not rigorous enough.
> https://www.thoughtco.com/is-anthropology-a-science-3971060
You can read in the article that people do not agree on whether anthropology is science or not.
> https://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/sociology/sociology-is-so...
Well here we run into a problem, anything that you don't want to hear is either spam or false information.
> http://cognitionandculture.net/blogs/benson-salers-blog/anth...
Yes but that still shows that people argue about this stuff. This topic is not closed.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26131-z => Neuroscience => Science
https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.17207 => Mathematics => Science
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2220570120 => Agricultural Science => Science
https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.12597 => Mathematics => Science
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33957-8 => Physics => Science
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add5462 => Hydrology => Science
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.02820 => Computer Science => Science
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26560-w => nope
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300166120 => nope
Sure. I already did that, and you disagreed with it. WP’s definition supports social science being categorized as science. I’m asking you for the definition that supports your claim, because WP’s does not.
> You can read in the article that people do not agree on whether anthropology is science or not.
You can read in it that some do. The conclusion says that at least some of it is good robust science, which disproves your claim.
> Well here we run into a problem, anything that you don't want to hear is either spam or false information.
Not true at all. Did you even bother to read the article and look at whether it’s authoritative? Yourarticlelibrary.com is a content spam site: the entire thing. Did you even read the article? It’s full of misspellings and false and stupid sentences. The problem is you aren’t even trying to evaluate the quality of the links you’re pasting, after googling a biased question for anything to back up your incorrect points. I’d be absolutely embarrassed to defend this article, and you should too, it’s trash. Your response is resorting again to ad-hominem, you simply don’t seem to be capable of sticking to arguing that the content is true or think critically about it.
I know that people argue about this topic, I’ve in fact mentioned that multiple times. Too bad that doesn’t prove anything.
I’m glad you agree that some of those are science, because all of them except the math paper are categorized as social science. Every Single One. The math paper is not science, it’s math.
You’re proving to me you don’t know what you’re talking about, and not curious to learn.
Okay so social sciences I do not consider science because they are not rigorous enough (I did write this in the past three messages...). The rest of the WP 1st paragraph I agree with.
> You can read in it that some do. The conclusion says that at least some of it is good robust science, which disproves your claim.
I did not send you the link to prove my claim. But you can derivate from this that there is no consensus on this topic. You'll probably argue that it is a closed topic because wikipedia says so, but I do not agree.
> Not true at all. Did you even bother to read the article and look at whether it’s authoritative? Yourarticlelibrary.com is a content spam site: the entire thing. Did you even read the article? It’s full of misspellings and false and stupid sentences. The problem is you aren’t even trying to evaluate the quality of the links you’re pasting, after googling a biased question for anything to back up your incorrect points. I’d be absolutely embarrassed to defend this article, and you should too, it’s trash. Your response is resorting again to ad-hominem, you simply don’t seem to be capable of sticking to arguing that the content is true or think critically about it.
If you want I can mark for you the texts that I consider truthful.
> I know that people argue about this topic, I’ve in fact mentioned that multiple times. Too bad that doesn’t prove anything.
What are you trying to prove? Who decides that social science is a science?
> I’m glad you agree that some of those are science, because all of them except the math paper are categorized as social science. Every Single One. The math paper is not science, it’s math.
Neuroscience < Biology < Natural Science
Agricultural Science < Multidisciplinary < Biology
Physics < Natural Science
Hydrology < Multidisciplinary but mostly Natural Science
Computer Science < Formal Sciences
Sorry but you seem to be quite wrong on this one. The only credit I could give you is on multidisciplinary sciences, but there again I would exclude social sciences as valid parts of the respective science. Mathematics is often considered a science.
> You’re proving to me you don’t know what you’re talking about, and not curious to learn.
Do you want to hear my opinion of what I think about you? I think you are proclaiming a false sense of intellectualism by being pendant where it is absolutely unnecessary. I've already stated my point of view multiple times and it is simple enough that you should understand me. You do understand my point of view but continue to inquire information from me as if to show me a lesson. I have the feeling we continue in circles so unless there is something else to tell I'd like to close the topic.
I’m just trying to get you to be even a little bit rigorous, but you haven’t been able to put any rigor behind your claim whatsoever, you seem unable to argue your claim, because you simply keep repeating it. You’ve resorted to ad-hominem instead of discussing the issue in most of your comments in this thread, and you’re doing it again.
The evidence you’ve provided of a so-called “debate” over whether social science is a science is incredibly weak. Most of it was irrelevant to your specific point because either you’re confused about the difference between humanities and social science or you read the click-bait headline but didn’t catch the conclusion. Most of what you brought so far was single obscure opinion pieces by one person that fail to show any significant disagreement about social science. The existence of someone who says something hyperbolic on the internet is not evidence of a lack of consensus.
Meanwhile, the single Wikipedia link stating without hesitation that social science is considered a science represents thousands of people who agree that social science is a science. Wikipedia is generally pretty good about acknowledging a lack of consensus. So if you think you’re right that there’s enough lack of consensus, then you should edit the Wikipedia page and get it to permanently state either a lack of consensus or permanently state that social science isn’t science.
Yes totally I think you should scour Puja Mondal’s “article” to pick out the sentences that are true among the many sentences that are untrue. Maybe doing that exercise would help you see how hopelessly terrible that article is. I’m stunned you’re doubling down on this particular point. What is the value of some true sentences in an opinion article that has many false statements, and is written by someone with no expertise?
BTW I didn’t define those papers as social science, the science journals nature, science and PNAS did. (For example https://www.nature.com/collections/ccjddcabab) Agriculture, being a human endeavor, is considered part social science, and any given paper can lean heavily into the social science. The paper you called CS is really computational social science, and obviously so since it’s trying to recognize human emotion. All the papers listed are multidisciplinary and all involve social science. You are further demonstrating that you don’t know what social science is.
So what’s your expertise? Why is your opinion on social science even relevant?
But it is a sin to transmit your disease to others knowingly. No one is interested in broken epistemology.
What? It has to start somewhere, doesn't it? Also, it clearly offers a basis for probabilistic analysis for future studies. How is this not science?
Saying social 'science', gives the credibility of science.
Heck, I'd really like a scale that can measure the credibility. P values are a bandaid.
For instance, chemistry is pretty solid science right? Well, if you make polyurethane in a box, the 'same way' each time, you are going to have bubbles in seemingly random locations, with maybe some correlation. Whatever the case, its not perfectly repeatable due to macro scale complexities.
I don't think this would do too much for the scientific community, because most are aware. But I do think it would help teenagers understand the difference.
I cringe whenever I hear things like "But it was peer reviewed and in this fancy journal". Yeah give me replication and I'll take a look.
I think the issue is that if you create an economically and culturally hostile environment, it prevents assimilation. It doesn't matter what your race, religion etc. is at that point. Recall the state of Irish immigrants in the early U.S., that's where the meme "paddy wagon" results from.
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.
This is diametrically opposite what I experienced on the mainland.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess weirdness is a matter of culture.
In any case touristic areas show a distorted reflect on the honesty of the country. Honesty is directly proportional to stability. Work in touristic areas is seasonary and unstable
Not to mention I’ve never in my life seen a firearms check next to the coat check in any establishment.
Meanwhile as I age, the number of healthcare/medical related problems become more real.
Few people talk about obesity being a problem, Fewer talk about the other 50% of causes of death.
I don't recall any museums in the US with such instructions, either.
Although in Plovdiv, an ancient Roman historical site accessed by stairs down on a busy shopping street, does have a sign explicitly indicating that you shouldn't take your guns in (also no dogs, no smoking); https://goo.gl/maps/ucGTpQQNwxK8hCMi6
Sure, they didn't have a place for you to leave them and pick them up later, you were expected to figure storage on your own, I suppose.
You can also see such signs at train stations.
In France, it's very hard to legally own a gun.
So, as another commenter remarked, I suspect that this plays a major role in the apparent contradiction you highlight.
It's a stark contrast with big cities in parts of Asia where I go. Sometimes I'm toying with an idea of moving to Europe but apart from troubles getting digital nomad visa petty crime is also a thing that scares me.
(However it's not generally supported by published crime stats so I'm not 100% sure whether to be worried)
I’ve I’m gonna get robbed, I’m gonna get robbed. Rather not have a Glock stuck in my face while it’s happening.
You should not. There is some level of crime anywhere, but big cities have become much safer than they used to be, at least in the West. Shit still happens sometimes, but there is no reason to be worried if you have a reasonable behaviour. I know of a couple of people who got their phone stolen or who had a burglary, but many more who lost wallets by dropping or forgetting them somewhere.
I mean cities in other countries, without such a central CCTV network but still safe. Walk with XL sized phone hanging out from your back pocket in city centre safe. If you can do it in Paris (or leave your laptop in a cafe while you go pee) then sure.
But I read a story how phone was snatched out from guy's hands at a crossing in central London so I doubt it. I use phone while walking a lot so in Europe I should better be rich enough I can buy a new one easily.
Not true. Major asian cities are pretty much safe throughout.
> That said, having lived in Beijing for a bit I would guess it is technically safer there, you just are living in a panopticon.
The guy said asian cities. Not beijing. Also if beijing is a panopticon, what is london? Super panopticon?
Are most asian cities panopticons too? Or are you just picking on beijing because of an agenda?
https://wikitravel.org/en/New_York_City
But living in NYC, riding the subway, and walking through Times Sq on the regular (NYC's 25 screen multiplex is there, across the street from a 13 screen) I never heard of anybody getting pickpocketed.
Maybe there's a pattern there?
When I took my family from Brazil to visit Orlando, every single person and tourism agency told me to do just that (and hide the money out of pockets).
I imagine they do that for NYC too. Looks like a universal rule that wherever you go there will pickpockets specialized in tourists.
In Paris, I never had a problem, because I look local. But my mother from the country side actually got troubles, because she looked like an easy prey, despite take much more care about her sutff than I do.
Too bad japan isn't on the list. I would expect a high level of personal honesty there.
That said, there is still yakuza in japan. I wonder how that works.
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.
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.
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.
Getting a skilled tradesperson to your house is going to cost $100 at an absolute minimum. Then parts and such. New home depo locks will be cheaper.
There are instruction available on how to change them, but even me, and I am not afraid of DIY, called one of the many locksmiths around here in Stockholm.
> 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.
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
> 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....
(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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Civic honesty around the globe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20236444 - June 2019 (395 comments)
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.
> 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.