Just How Honest?

Here’s an interesting study. Researchers dropped wallets containing various objects including money in cities around the world and kept track of how many were returned and whether the contents made a difference. It did. From Science:

Does temptation shape dishonesty? For example, when a person finds a wallet on the street and decides to return it to its owner, it may be because the contents of the wallet are not very tempting or, alternatively, because people care about complying with norms of good conduct, that is, civic honesty. Scientists commonly explore such questions about human honesty through artificial laboratory tasks, but such studies have not provided conclusive evidence about the extent to which people are honest in natural circumstances. Cohn et al. (1) describe a field experiment involving 17,000 people in 40 countries to provide a new measure of honesty. The results show just how prevalent civic honesty is, and they raise many questions, such as how environments can be designed to foster civic honesty.

The more money a wallet contained the more likely it was to be returned. The researchers attributed that to a combination of altruism and “theft aversion” (they didn’t want to feel like thieves).

The results varied by country, too, with the Swiss, Norse, Dutch, Danes, and Swedes the most likely to return the wallets (in that order) and the Chinese the least likely with the U. S. somewhere in the middle.

I also think that the results form a fair proxy for the degree to which people trust their governments and why. We have good reason to trust our government half as much as the Swiss do theirs.

Hat tip: Gizmodo