Civic honesty around the globe
science.sciencemag.org
science.sciencemag.org
Normally we'd consider closing the thread in a case like this, to prevent it from being brigaded. But this is an unusual case and I'm curious to see how far it goes.
In case any of the new commenters happens to read this: I'm the lead moderator of Hacker News. Would you mind sharing with us how you found out about this discussion? It's unusual for us to see so much activity in a thread that is already several days old, and I'm curious to find out what happened.
The more I look at it, the more I think what happened in the comments below is a remarkable example of cross-cultural communication. Not all of the communication was very high quality, of course, but that was to be expected under the circumstances.
I'd guess that the author is no longer checking the thread, because it's so rare for one of these threads to spark back up again after several days. I doubt that he was overwhelmed, because he was responding openly to criticism earlier, and it would surely be an interesting learning experience.
p.s. Your posts in the thread were very good: thoughtful and substantive, which is what we're looking for here. I hope you'll stick around HN long enough to see if it satisfies your intellectual curiosity. That's the purpose of the site: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The news has been trending on Chinese sites for days, and when it's something as sensational as "China ranked lowest in global HONESTY study", people started to ask why, many went ahead and read the paper, found potential flaws in the design of the study, and wanted their questions answered. And when valid questions are not yet being addressed, many start to question the motivation behind this paper; the motivation of using labels like "honesty", that clearly has moral implications; the motivation behind Science publishing it, etc. Did the author exclude Japan because the result differed drastically from what was expected? Did the author include China because the result conveniently confirms the stereotypes? Are there any ethical concerns for such studies? After all, this seems to be a study about how likely it is for hotel staff to email the owner of the lost wallet in different countries, but it is being phrased into something much bigger.
Not saying those are real motivations of the paper, just emotions and speculation running wild in Chinese forums, then people get a bit angry, because they feel it's unjust, and they want to look for ways to communicate outside of Chinese social media.
Anyways, thanks for still keeping the discussion open. Most just want to have their voice heard, as they feel very, very strongly about it. And a possible explanation of commenting in Chinese is to force native English speakers to look up the translation, some sort of reference to how the study is conducted in English, even in China.
I'd never heard of Zhihu. When you say it's a question-and-answer forum, that makes me think of Quora. I wonder how it would compare to that, or even to HN.
2. The difference between money and no-money percentage may be a better indicator of civil honesty. The absolute percentage reflects more about a “I’ll wait for someone to come” or “not my business” attitude of desk clerks.
3. It is better to put something important to the owner but not everyone else in the wallet, such as a driver license or national ID card. This could reduce “not my business” factor.
For example my MIL is a medical doctor, so is obviously educated, speaks English well and uses a smart phone but wouldn't be able to send email to a new contact. Same with WhatsApp, she can reply to messages from us but I don't think she knows how to add a new contact to her phone.
That sounds like something my mother would ask me if (and previously when) she didn’t know how to email someone. Although it’d definitely lower the “conversion” rate regardless given the varying smartphone/PC ownership combined with internet penetration rates.
Speaking from experience as we once tried to help her to connect to a open WiFi which needed an OTP-based login via the phone and gave up after about 15 frustrating minutes for all three of us!
I've noticed working in design that people generally underestimate the average human's ability to solve problems, even if they aren't technically literate. But any increase in the effort department would reduce the amount of returns no doubt.
1. This is a fair point. In the Supplemental Material, we explore cross-country differences in email usage. When we statistically adjust for country-level differences in email usage (using World Bank data), the country ranking remains essentially the same (adjusted rankings correlate over 0.90 with non-adjusted rankings). Also, when you restrict the data only to drop-offs performed at hotels -- which tend to rely on email more than other settings -- you see the same pattern of results.
2. Also a good point. However, there are mechanical problems with using the marginal differences between conditions -- for example, countries with high reporting rates in the NoMoney condition will be naturally capped in the possible size of the treatment treatment effect, compared to those with low reporting rates. Because the scale is bounded at 0 and 100% you're also fighting against reversion to the mean at the low and high ends of the distribution. FWIW we find that absolute levels of reporting rates correlate very highly with other known proxies of honesty both within and between countries (measures like tax evasion, corruption, etc), whereas relative differences between conditions do not.
3. We explicitly test this by randomly varying whether the wallets contained a key or not (valuable to the owner but not the recipient), while holding the rest of the contents in the wallet constant.
For hotels, I had experience that a 5-star hotel responded my message after almost a month. They have it but not in your way of using it.
Anyway, did you know the reason for their not writing that email?
I like this idea.
Instead of designing things properly (large scale zoning, zoning laws that make sense, building codes to improve the quality of life) we make poor decisions based on cheep and fast; externalize the costs; then make living with those costs a fear/punishment based enforcement.
If "peace officers" were out doing only commonly agreed good things, improving lives rather than being 'tough on crime' then they'd be part of a solution rather than a problem.
I'm Australian and the idea of that blows me away. Like a third-world country. I've seen all the videos of shootings and disgraceful behaviour but I thought those were probably all rare incidents in bad neighbourhoods.
Here in Australia, I've had nothing but professional interactions with our police. I wouldn't hesitate to call them if there was a need or take a lost object to them.
Our laws are certainly heading more and more in a scary direction however.
No, this seems like an unusual perspective in the US especially for something as simple as dropping off a wallet.
Because the cost of being arrested, shot, etc. is quite high, it’s arguably logical to avoid most if not all interactions with them even if the odds of something going wrong seem relatively low, particularly when you have little to nothing to gain from engaging.
Even if you calculate that you’re not at significant personal risk from engaging, it might make sense to do so for other reasons, e.g. in solidarity with others who are targeted unfairly, and/or (plausibility of this aside) to simply attempt to get along without them.
Btw, in both countries there's a rule (at least in Poland it's in the civic law, probably more like a custom in Switzerland), that the person who found your wallet can receive some share (finder's fee) of money, in Poland currently 10%.
It never occurred to me to get it to the Police station. Probably because they never found my wallet when I reported it (and reporting it was a PITA, 2 hours of lot time).
I did not expect China to top the list or anywhere near there, but such cherry picking of data is indeed concerning. By the way, where are South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Singapore? Were these countries/regions (culturally similar to China) also excluded because the data did not fit the authors' expectations?
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1540-5893.37...
Abstract
This article examines the lost property regime of Japan, which has one of the most impressive reputations in the world for returning lost property to its rightful owner, and compares it with that of the United States. Folk legend attributes Japanese lost‐and‐found success to honesty and other‐regarding preferences. In this article, I focus on another possible explanation: legal institutions that efficiently and predictably allocate and enforce possessory rights. These recognized, centuries‐old rules mesh with norms, institutional structures, and economic incentives to reinforce mutually the message that each sends and yields more lost‐property recovery than altruism alone.
To carry out the experiment, the presenter and his daughter visited the Tokyo Skytree’s Sola Machi entertainment complex’s food court and left a smartphone, purse, and shopping bag full of recently purchased items on table for two. Then they positioned themselves at another table and surreptitiously filmed what happened.
A solid hour passed, with no one at all disturbing their unprotected belongings. As a matter of fact, while at the food court they saw a number of other people also stake out tables using bags, purses, and even baby strollers, which, being wheeled, are particularly easy to run off with. Eventually, the presenter decided to retrieve his possessions, not because he was worried that someone would steal them, but because he thought the cleaning staff might think they’d been forgotten and take them to the lost-and-found.
This remarkable trustworthiness wasn’t a fluke, either. Next, the presenter and his daughter made their way to a Starbucks branch where he decided to leave even more tempting bait: his MacBook Pro.
He even placed the laptop, all by itself, on a table behind where he was seated…but 25 minutes later, it was still there, and the presenter decided to call it a wrap.
Amazing.
What's also amazing is that there seems to be a very common belief that when people move to another country, they entirely adopt the culture of that country. So, if Japanese people immigrate to a country where leaving your Macbook unattended in a coffee shop will result in it being stolen, it is expected that their theft statistics will rise to resemble that of the host country. I wonder how true this belief is.
My sense is that our results probably serve as a lower bound on reporting rates -- if the person who dropped off the wallet comes across as a local, reporting rates would be higher. But this is pure speculation.
Other philosophies accept a flawed humanity and find hope in other things.
But most people don't think about it too much, I suspect. They love their dog, their kids, and a couple friends and that's good enough.
Pics: Fig S1 @ https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/suppl/2019/06/19/...
That doesn’t look like any wallet I’ve ever seen. Did it really have to be clear and look like a plastic envelope? Maybe not enough random people would pick it up if it was a real dark wallet (vs say a staff member who cleans the place)?
It’s always good to question how the experiment reflects real life if we’re going to use it to influence real life policy and business decisions. But it’s possible this still sufficiently measured people’s honesty since the basic idea is the same (returning found property of value).
The other factor is the job title. Wouldn’t a “Software Engineer” be less likely to seem in need rather than the average (ie, working class) job title? Given a large enough pool I’m sure this could influence how people factored in the effort of finding the person vs feel-good emotional (or moral, ideological, etc) reward of doing good.
Basically: if the amount of the money mattered, then wouldn’t the job title of this new person whom you only know has business cards and a good job?
The disadvantage of using a clear business-card case over a traditional wallet is clear, in that it is relatively unusual. The advantage of using a clear case, however, is that it affords considerably more experimental control in that you can be relatively certain that every recipient knows what is inside. With a wallet, there will be variation in who decides to inspect the wallet, and that introduces selection effects into the experimental design (i.e., are those who are willing to look inside a wallet, compared to those who don't, different in their degree of honesty?). This makes interpreting the evidence a lot more challenging.
FWIW we examined how our measure of civic honesty compares to other known proxies of honest behavior (tax evasion, corruption, etc) within and between countries. If there was something artificial or unique about our setting -- such as using unusual clear business card cases -- then you wouldn't expect our results to generalize or correlate with other measures of honest behavior. However, we find response rates correlate very highly with these other proxies of honesty, suggesting that they are tapping into some broader construct.
2) I feel dishonesty is a too big word and this title/claim goes too far. I think it more reflects the sense of responsibility of the employees at this particular job. 'Not my business' is different from being dishonest.
The workload, the degree of satisfaction towards the job and even how natural to communicate in English/via email will largely affect whether an employee would send out that email, which isn't part of their duty in their understanding. They might just leave it there at the counter. Again, I won't call that person being dishonest.
3) The nonusual looking of the wallet and the whole act might be more perceived as a spam or fishing for info in certain regions. In deed, when I moved to one big city in the US, I became less willing to reply to missing phone calls compared to a rather spam-free top city of a different country. Your subjects in certain countries might just be very alert to your behavior.
Your notion makes zero sense. Wanting to keep the money never incentivizes contact. If they wanted to keep the money, the surest way to accomplish that is to just keep it.
>Wanting to keep the money never incentivizes contact.
It could in combination with the authors' hypothesis of not wanting to view oneself as a thief. Under that condition, the likely behaviour is to simply let the wallet sit in a lost-and-found drawer. Writing the email starts the clock on a license to take it while giving yourself a rationalization.
you don't know if the wallet owner or that original person will turn up and make enquiries as to what happened, and of you just keep the money, there is a real risk your actions being discovered.
whereas at least if you TRY to return the wallet, when you do eventually keep the money, you have an angle of both plausible defense, and arguably, natural justice on your side...
Is that 98% going back to locations that had contacted you? I'd be interested in the figure for returning to locations that didn't contact you, say after a week. But In understand how it could be logistically tricky. Congrats on the paper.
Yes, we only went back for those who contacted us first. Your idea is an interesting one, but it gets at something else (how many people, who otherwise would keep the wallet, instead would turn over the wallet when confronted by the owner). We collected wallets from those who contacted us to rule out the possibility that they are returning the wallets empty.
But in the figure the highest return rate is still below 90%, this just makes me think how do you select the subset to retrive the cash?
But after self-reflection, I'm more likely to report it if it did have money.
If it had money, I'd feel an obligation to protect it and return it to the owner. If it didn't, I'd feel more like it's their problem.
In only one case do you actually lose money. Both cases require the same effort to make contact.
For the civic-honesty-minded person who has to balance that effort cost to themselves against the victim's loss, there's going to naturally be a stronger impulse to help the person who stands to lose more.
Say I've lost both a house key and also enough information to, in the current era of scummy personal information aggregation websites, find out my home address, which you can definitely commonly do based on just name and email address and an assumption of local residency. Then regardless of whether I get the key back I should in paranoia change the locks on my house, because now an unscrupulous person who found it easily has a copy of the key and knows exactly where to use it.
So if it's a house key, then in defense it should have no more value to me but has significant (hopefully temporary) value to them.
I'm quite impressed how in most countries, it's a function of empathy vs. how much hassle it is to return things.
Losing a key means changing the locks, the more duplicate keys the higher the cost.
If it has lots of money that amount probably is a non-trivial amount to the wallet owner and you feel obligated to return it as you would want the same.
Looks like they didn't adjust for PPP when they did the experiment. Not sure it would make _much_ difference. But $13 might mean more in some places than in others. Even within the US. $13 in San Francisco vs $13 in dusty Fresno.
[EDIT] narrowing it down, I'd probably be sadder about the money at $500. So it's somewhere between those numbers.
Without it someone could get a credit based on this ID and you wouldn't have a strong case in court that you didn't take it.
Other reactions. I wasn't suprised to see the United States right in the middle. I was surprised that Canada wasn't further up. I was surprised that Russia was ahead of Canada.
And what makes Mexico so different than every other country?
Also I wonder if this was done in big cities like Mexico City (my guess) or more evenly distributed. I have a perception that Mexican society in general is pretty honest, but big cities are more rootless and impersonal. But this didn't seem to apply to India or other high density countries.
I would make proper effort if the wallet contained more money or a drivers license or bank cards. But around here no one is going to miss $13.45 and a shopping list.
[1]https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/suppl/2019/06/19/...
I'd guess (out of my ass, of course) that many people didn't steal it but also didn't bother. They just left it there for someone to come and pick it up. And I'd also guess they didn't trust they co-workers not to steal the money if they left the wallet there at the end of their shift, that's why more wallets with money were reported.
When I was living in Saudi Arabia for a time as a kid I was told not to pick up money even on the street or I could have my hand chopped off. However much truth there was to that message, I suspect that mentality could colour the results and probably falls outside honesty and duty.
That must have been a fun study to work on! I wonder how much funding they received for it.
And it is strange almost everyone, including myself, intuits the opposite. Where does this negative view of people come from?
In that vein, I wonder, when the desk clerk received an empty wallet, if they sometimes thought the money had already been taken and they would be blamed.
Usually, trust is something which must be earned. When we don't have any information about a person, the default position is one of distrust (pending further information), as the cost of being swindled can be significant. A strange side-effect is that we implicitly assume that most people cannot be trusted.
Alipay, the biggest mobile payment company in China, did the tests in several cities.
Without any guarantee and supervision, people can borrow and need too return their favorite product from a shelf with just a name.
https://video.sina.cn/tech/2019-06-06/detail-ihvhiews7158597...
Participants’ lifestyle is different from researchers’. We use instant message apps for work and dailylife communication rather than Email, (e.g., apps WeChat, QQ. )
Without considering these variables (language barrier and lifestyle) into account. It’s unreasonable to call it a fair test.
Without knowing the experimental subjects, how come this impractical can be regarded as fair?
If you want to know real China, go there and live like a Chinese, you will find out things are totally different with this unfair test.
2. The survaillance camera coverage could be a fairly important factor, which is merely slightly memtioned in this article. Take China, UK and the U.S. as examples. China has more and more coverage of surveillance cameras now, about 10 per thousand person (http://new.mbu.cn/zjc/article/212/13759), but still not comparable to developed countries (75 in England and 96 in the U.S. per thousand person). This would change people's awareness whether there exist a camera or not.
3. As a scientific article, shouldn't it be culturally-neutral to avoid being used as tools to undermine some cultures? In this sense, the author and the journal editor clearly did not qualify. The result is potentially prejudiced and not purely scientific. And that's why lot's of people in these countries would have emotional comments on this.
P.S.: Hail Bibi :)
In some nations, stuff just wasn't touched at all for hours.
I didn't think a scientific study would be done on this and published.
(Owner found me, because the info desk at least wrote down my number)
MOST CHINESE PEOPLE DO NOT USE EMAIL TO CONTACT STRANGERS!
Last time I check Science is still a journal of "science". What happened to change that? The entrenched bias towards Chinese ppl? Interesting.
I just want to ask how much does it cost to make such a low-quality paper be published in the journal Science？
As many people said, Chinese people do not use email at all. Some people like my father, who asked the iPhone store to set up an apple id for him. Only 38% people use email, and most of them just use it during the work time.
We are more likely to message people instead of emailing.
Second, we are told that do not directly contact the people's information on their belonging. Because it might be a spam. Give it to the policeman or "lost and found" is the right behavior.
Many people like me do respect Science, which is most authorized educational magazine. So please retrieve this article!!
Also, the wallets have a cost too, so it is not only the equivalent of $13 being lost in some cases.
They did in some cases (seven cities in the Czech Republic and Switzerland) then drop by in person to try to retrieve the wallets, but (unless I misunderstood) that's only about 1% of the wallets.
I must to say that in China we have more.
This ‘objective’ method really makes me laugh.
I'd say someone is rather aggressively defensive.
You're not even going to Science Magazine to yell at them; you're coming to a discussion on a completely different, unrelated site.
This sure looks like someone's orchestrating this response...
By the way, how do u know we have not sent emails to Science Magazine and yelled at them?
Er, did I miss something in the article? What's that got to do with anything?
It's certainly not surprising.
>especially as a bastion of religious freedom
I would not use the word bastion here. Maybe technically it has religious freedom in code, but in practice it tends to be quite poor.
This sort of came to a head when a small child was run over and many pedestrians passed without helping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wang_Yue
So I'm imagining many Chinese people might be reluctant to return a wallet in case it turns out to be some sort of scam.
https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/heres-the-...
Edited my comment anyway, because I don't want my main account banned from here.
When I looked at the methodology, it has tons of thousands of holes. For example, only contact by email is counted as valid, what about countries that do not use email frequently? Does the wallet look like a wallet in the country?
This is so ridiculous that Science is publishing this type of nonsense research!
Most interesting - the $13/$100 difference.
Notice that in the US and UK, the 'return rate' goes way up when there's $100 in the wallet, but when only $13 it's quite low.
In Switzerland and Sweden, it's high even for $13.
I think there might be a difference between 'core conscientiousness' and 'meaningful conscientiousness'.
In Sweden and Switzerland, it's a matter of propriety to 'return the wallet'. It's appropriate behaviour. They have smaller, tighter communities, you may even know the person. So they 'just do the right thing' because it doesn't matter what's in the wallet.
In the US/UK culture the thinking might be $13 - nobody is care, it's not worth the hassle to report. But as soon as there's money, then it becomes a material matter of conscientiousness, i.e. 'people will miss $100, it's worth the effort to report it'.
I think $13 is just not really enough money, not that much different from $0. It's almost change.
$100 is a nice, meaningful threshold.
Finally, China ... ouch.
Also, the results are perfectly correlated with transparency international index [1]
It's interesting because it may be that 'corruption' is not just a systematic issue in governance, but it may be correlated or predicted with even more basic levels of civic conscientiousness, as measured by tests such as this.
"There's a reason the authors stopped short of making any social commentary in their study." I think because it would be way out of bounds. Casual commenters such as us have a little space to speculate (unless dang gets fussy), but it'd be too improper for researchers to make assumptions.
One major thing missing in this study is the rural/urban divide. I suggest London is not representative in any way of the rest of the UK, and neither is Manchester the same as Penzance.
Edit: I should note that the authors do indeed go into trying to find cultural correlates, they go right for '% protestant' etc. and make some fairly speculative comments which I would be uncomfortable with because these are all just correlations. Notably, one of the highest 'correlations' is 'latitude' (!), it's not as though being at a certain latitude makes one more civic. Maybe there are other, related, factors, but it's certainly not latitude.
I believe people in China understand very well what paper money is and means, in roughly/ballpark the same terms as Americans.
I could be wrong.
The question is do they store this paper money is wallets? Or is it carried in a pocket? Or do they have full sized binders the money is put in? Or fanny packs? Do they even carry cash anymore?
A 'wallet' in China is the the same thing as a 'wallet' in the USA or Sweden.
Like how women in the US carry purses. I've never been to another country. Do all cultures use purses? If they do is it both genders or only one? I don't know.
I was raised in China and certainly got many of my lost things back growing up. Just because many Chinese folks prefer not to contact the owners directly does not mean they do not use other ways to return lost items :)
this makes it more difficult to get it back than in some of the top rated countries. Do hope to change. But this is not really about civic honesty.
If it was a regular wallet full of useful cards, perhaps some sentimental things like photos etc. then I'd want to get it back to them regardless of whether it contained some cash. I think this experiment might work better with a backpack or a mobile phone.
A grocery list and a business card is hardly 'a wallet'.
Even with $13 ... that's still 'a wallet with some lose change'.
Without credit cards, id, or some some real money, i.e. 'meaningful to the person who lost it', it's an odd measure.
"Civic honesty" is, oh, finding five dollars and declaring it as income on your next tax return.
civic: "of or relating to a citizen, a city, citizenship, or community affairs" (merriam-webster).
"Wallets were returned to one of five societal institu- tions: (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."