Kailash Kumar
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Would you return a lost wallet to the owner?
Read the following abstract from the study 'Civic honesty around the globe' published on 20 June 2019 in Science magazine.
Civic honesty is essential to social capital and economic development, but is often in conflict with material self-interest.
We examine the trade-off between honesty and self-interest using field experiments in 355 cities spanning 40 countries around the globe.
We turned in over 17,000 lost wallets with varying amounts of money at public and private institutions, and measured whether recipients contacted the owner to return the wallets.
In virtually all countries citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money.
Both non-experts and professional economists were unable to predict this result.
Additional data suggest our main findings can be explained by a combination of altruistic concerns and an aversion to viewing oneself as a thief, which increase with the material benefits of dishonesty.
The figure below shows the results from the 40 countries around the globe.
Fig. 1 Share of wallets reported in the NoMoney and Money condition by country.
Left hand side: Share of wallets reported in treatments NoMoney (US $0) and Money (US $13.45) by country. The amount of money in the wallet is adjusted according to each country’s purchasing power.
Right hand side: Average difference between treatment Money and NoMoney across quartiles based on absolute response rates in the NoMoney condition. Error bars represent standard errors of the mean.
Source and full study:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/early/2019/06/19/science.aau8712.full.pdf
Read the following abstract from the study 'Civic honesty around the globe' published on 20 June 2019 in Science magazine.
Civic honesty is essential to social capital and economic development, but is often in conflict with material self-interest.
We examine the trade-off between honesty and self-interest using field experiments in 355 cities spanning 40 countries around the globe.
We turned in over 17,000 lost wallets with varying amounts of money at public and private institutions, and measured whether recipients contacted the owner to return the wallets.
In virtually all countries citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money.
Both non-experts and professional economists were unable to predict this result.
Additional data suggest our main findings can be explained by a combination of altruistic concerns and an aversion to viewing oneself as a thief, which increase with the material benefits of dishonesty.
The figure below shows the results from the 40 countries around the globe.
Fig. 1 Share of wallets reported in the NoMoney and Money condition by country.
Left hand side: Share of wallets reported in treatments NoMoney (US $0) and Money (US $13.45) by country. The amount of money in the wallet is adjusted according to each country’s purchasing power.
Right hand side: Average difference between treatment Money and NoMoney across quartiles based on absolute response rates in the NoMoney condition. Error bars represent standard errors of the mean.
Source and full study:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/early/2019/06/19/science.aau8712.full.pdf
