Civic honesty around the globe (2019)
science.org
science.org
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Retired man finds 10k Euros and gives them back to the owner. Reward of 500 Euros: 'too much'"
https://milano.corriere.it/notizie/lombardia/23_luglio_07/co...
> 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
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.
(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).
Civic honesty around the globe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20236444 - June 2019 (395 comments)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.