Civic honesty around the globe

Very nice and unintuitive main finding. I wish there was a separate condition where they sent a second experimenter back to the location of the hand-in to ask for the wallet. Just waiting for a contact leaves some room for unpredictable effects: perhaps with no money, the person can't even be bothered to deal with it. With money, there is an incentive to try to contact in the hope that if no response is received within a short period, the money can be kept.

> With money, there is an incentive to try to contact in the hope that if no response is received within a short period, the money can be kept.

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.

Thanks for your comments (I'm one of the authors on this paper). For a subset of the countries, we went back to retrieve the wallets (logistically, collecting the wallets turned out to be extremely difficult, which is why we didn't collect them everywhere). We find that over 98% of the money was returned, so doesn't seem to be the case that people are contacting the owner but pocketing the cash.

What's the point of your first sentence?

>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.

>We find that over 98% of the money was returned, so doesn't seem to be the case that people are contacting the owner but pocketing the cash.

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.

Many thanks.

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.

zero sense, really? a lost wallet has been handed in, and at least one other person has witnessed the wallet being handed in (not even assuming cctv, other people, or supervisors).

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...

>We find that over 98% of the money was returned, so doesn't seem to be the case that people are contacting the owner but pocketing the cash.

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?