Civic honesty around the globe

At first I thought it was counterintuitive.

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.

I don't find it counterintuitive at all. It's just less of a big deal to lose a wallet that has no money in it than one that does have money in it.

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.

I agree. It depends on the value. If it's a wallet with an ID and CCs. Most likely the owner will at first chance cancel all CCs and request new ID. So the value is in the wallet itself. For the most part billfolds are cheap.

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.

Tragedy of the Commons

I'd be more inclined to turn in a wallet with an ID, regardless of whether it contained any money. Those things are a PITA to replace!

Quick clarification: we did adjust for purchasing power parity across countries (but not within countries). As you surmised, even for differences between cities like SF and Fresno, the PPP adjustments would be negligible for the wallet amounts we were using.

Actually the wallet in the study just contained some business cards, no ID or credit cards.

The amount of money in the wallet would have to be well over $100 before I was more sad about that than about having to get my ID and various other cards re-issued. I can't get closer to the exact amount where the tipping point would be without it happening, but definitely higher than that.

[EDIT] narrowing it down, I'd probably be sadder about the money at $500. So it's somewhere between those numbers.

Right, but that's you. What about your expectations of how other people would react? I'm still pleasantly surprised.

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?

I agree. I don't care about the money or the cards in my wallet, but having to go to the DMV to get my license replaced would be the absolute worst part.

They controlled for exactly what you are saying. They added a key which has value only to the wallet owner and not the finder. There was not as big of an increase in returns. This led them to conclude the more likely explanation was the “I’m not a thief” reasoning.

I don't think the key is a strong control without more information about the key.

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 not sure if the key is like that. In today's age of easy key duplication, you probably have key backups via your relationships and you could go to a key duplication vending machine and get it done for $5 when you go to a grocery store.

I'm quite impressed how in most countries, it's a function of empathy vs. how much hassle it is to return things.

I'm Mexican, and this results baffles me too. I would say that maybe current perception of government corruption (which has been declining for years and is really really low) has a lot to do, since many people might feel that Mexican society is in debt with them because of the poor perception we have against the current state of affairs.

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.

Wallets are pretty cheap, if I found one with just some business cards and no money I'd in all honestly just toss it in the trash and assume it was litter...

I would probably only make a token effort to contact the owner – $13.45 isn't very much.

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.

But most sane persons will block their ID and make a new one as soon as they see they lost it.

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.

And in fact it was nothing more than a clear plastic business card holder. It looked like trash to me.

The key value is in avoidance of loss (burglary), not in needing to get a new key cut.

Losing a key means changing the locks, the more duplicate keys the higher the cost.

Except that getting the key back still means changing the locks because the finder could have duplicated it, so it seems like there's not a lot of value in giving it back except in the case that it's their only copy that they will use until they change the lock.