Civic honesty around the globe (2019)

I accidentally left my wallet in a taxi on the way from Madrid airport into central Madrid. The taxi driver actually <i>called me</i> and came back a couple hours later. (I gave her 100 Euros that she could have simply taken).<p>Unfortunately, the next day the same wallet was snatched out of my pocket in the Plaza Mayor, and I didn&#x27;t realize it until I reached to pay for a meal. Talk about variance.

I believe the methodology is flawed.<p>&gt; The business cards displayed the owner’s name and email address and we used fictitious but commonplace male names for each country.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t even know what email is, I&#x27;d imagine the email contact rate to be quite low.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.twinova.com&#x2F;email-dead-long-live-wechat&#x2F;#:~:text=Email%20Newsletter%20is%20Dying%20in%20China&amp;text=The%20statistics%20below%20from%20CNNIC,a%20paltry%20rate%20of%2026.9%25" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.twinova.com&#x2F;email-dead-long-live-wechat&#x2F;#:~:text...</a>.

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 &quot;mind their business&quot;, not that they are particularly dishonest.

It&#x27;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.

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 &quot;solved&quot; 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.<p>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&#x27;t think that&#x27;s the reason.<p>The only consolation is that China has managed to score even worse.

One glaring presupposition (which is false) of &quot;rationalist approaches&quot;, 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: &quot;Rationalist approaches to economics assume that people value their own interests over the interests of strangers.&quot;<p>It is NOT in my interest to be dishonest. To think it is is to fail to understand that human nature is <i>thoroughly social</i> 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.<p>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 <i>per se</i> is also harmful to the individual in the <i>very act</i> of being dishonest. A person is corrupted in the <i>very act</i> of being dishonest.<p>[0] I am <i>not</i> 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 <i>atomic</i>, 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).

If I&#x27;m reading their experiment correctly, they&#x27;re only targeting employees behind the counter in public buildings. I&#x27;d be curious to know whether that influences the results at all.<p>Clearly there&#x27;s a cultural element to dishonesty but I&#x27;d guess that poorer less equal countries are going to do worse vs richer more equal ones.<p>edit: Also, I&#x27;m not sure if keeping the money is strictly speaking &quot;dishonest&quot;. Yeah it&#x27;s a bad thing but if your philosophy is finders keepers then, is that dishonest?

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?

Super weird that Mexico is so different on the money&#x2F;noMoney wallet test.<p>It&#x27;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.<p>I wonder why that is. Is there a cultural aspect to it?<p>Also kind of bummed that Japan and Korea are not on the list, would have been interesting to compare.

Looks like they picked the 5 largest cities in each country listed. I&#x27;d be far more interested to see the disparity between large cities, smaller cities, and smaller towns&#x2F;villages for each country.

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.

News from today, Milan, Italy<p>&quot;Retired man finds 10k Euros and gives them back to the owner. Reward of 500 Euros: &#x27;too much&#x27;&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;milano.corriere.it&#x2F;notizie&#x2F;lombardia&#x2F;23_luglio_07&#x2F;como-pensionato-trova-10-mila-euro-per-strada-e-li-restituisce-al-proprietario-me-ne-ha-dati-500-di-ricompensa-anche-troppo-81a7194a-2ac6-4754-8f2e-91ff1d94bxlk.shtml" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;milano.corriere.it&#x2F;notizie&#x2F;lombardia&#x2F;23_luglio_07&#x2F;co...</a>

This study is cleverly designed and found non-intuitive results (as measured by the study itself). Penultimate paragraph:<p>&gt; 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.

Would note the U.S. is absolutely average but China is very bad.

Discussed at the time:<p><i>Civic honesty around the globe</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20236444">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20236444</a> - June 2019 (395 comments)

I wonder if this is affected by number of pedestrians. If you left a wallet a block from me in Canada I’d never see it as I drive past it.

The setup of this experiment has a major flaw, the business card has only email address and in countries where email was never fully adopted like China or other, people would need to go extra miles to contact the wallet owner.

I wish they had done this in Japan, Korea and Taiwan as well.

Interesting that in Mexico and Peru the wallet without money was returned more often than the one with money. The gap was larger in Mexico.

There&#x27;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:<p>&gt; 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<p>Despite baity title &quot;Civic honesty around the globe&quot; - 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&#x27;s long read explanation that&#x27;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&#x27;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.