Civic honesty around the globe

We originally planned to include Japan but after some initial pilot testing we realized that the country was unsuitable for methodological reasons. Japan has a lot of small “police booths” where people can return lost objects. During our pilot tests, we found that Japanese citizens would not contact the owner but instead drop them off at a nearby police booth. This feature made it virtually impossible for us to assign individual wallets to particular drop-off locations.

>Japan has a lot of small “police booths” where people can return lost objects.

I like this idea.

It's a fantastic idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dban. A term for police is お巡りさん, "patrolman" (or, as I first read it, Mr. Walkaround lol). They're known for their neighborhood foot patrols as well as staffing the kōban, are very much a part of the community, and in my opinion play a big part in the very safe feeling Westerners often feel in Japan.

Hm.. wouldn't it bias your results in some countries too? I used to live in Poland, now living in Switzerland (both topping the chart), and in both countries it's pretty customary to drop found wallets/IDs at police stations.

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%.

Arguably not a good idea in the United States, where many people are justifiably reluctant to go anywhere near the police.

Then you have a chicken and egg problem. The cycle will be broken eventually; better to do it now in a controlled manner, even if it will be far from easy.

I was imagining the United States. I thought people would be more willing to approach a booth, which includes a physical barrier. While many people are afraid of the police, they nonetheless serve a necessary function, and many people are dissatisfied with the effectiveness of the police in their communities.

10% of cash inside? If so, I wonder how this fee could be amended for people who never carry cash.

Probably a flat minimum. In the US I'd imagine it'd best be a log curve starting with a minimum of "minimum wage (of an hour)" and then shifting to a % of the cash inside. Something like a gentle decay curve where every base 10 increase there's a halving of the percent cut.

It's more that the police are nearly always there to enforce punitive things rather than improve an actual public good.

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.

It's not really a proper solution, but libraries serve as a kind of alternative "official authority" for things like that in the part of the US where I currently live (one of their many unofficial jobs that aren't properly accounted for or funded). People seem to drop off stuff in the library even if they didn't find it there, because it's a place you can easily enter, and librarians are perceived as having some kind of official status (being government employees), but compared to others are seen as approachable and pretty honest and benign. So people assume the librarian will probably know what to do with the wallet and probably won't just pocket the cash. And, many people are less apprehensive about walking up to a library front desk compared to walking into a police station.

Well then, welcome to my world. Where I live - provincial Denmark - these days our local police resides behind a desk ... at the library. Mind you, this is police of a variety radically different from just about any aspect of American police I've ever seen described. Our police structure and organisation is in shambles, but at the personal level, a police officer is first and foremost a service provider, and the ones I've interacted with over the years have been unfailingly professionel, non-threatening, and polite. Also: Fit and never, ever overweight.

In the US, you can drop a wallet in any US post office mailbox to return it to its owner.

$20-50 seems like a fine reward for the average person. I’d probably give whatever money was in the wallet to them.

Are people really that scared of police in the US that they wouldn't return some lost property to them?

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.

Hmm, I live in Poland and once I found a lost wallet (no money inside, so probably someone stole it, almost every one has some small cash there, at least coins) and my first reaction was to mail it to the person it belongs to, there was a national ID inside and I did that.

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).

> Are people really that scared of police in the US that they wouldn't return some lost property to them?

No, this seems like an unusual perspective in the US especially for something as simple as dropping off a wallet.

Some are and some aren’t. I wouldn’t call it an “unusual” perspective as the sibling commenter did here, but I would say it’s probably not the perspective of the majority. It’s also going to vary depending on who you are and where you are.

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.

So you excluded Japan because there is an alternative mechanism that can cause low reporting rate. How can you be sure other countries don't have something similar (alternative mechanisms) that may account for the low reporting rate?

Exactly. I was raised in China and our culture shares many similarities with the Japanese. Some of us tend not to bother strangers unless necessary since it might be seen as rude. In these experiments, I imagine a fair number of Chinese simply decided to wait for the owners of lost items coming to them instead of the other way around.

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?

Different standards for different countries. Interesting!

That’s interesting. As far as I know, China has the similar feature. Why do you still include China in this paper without any pilot testing. Or do you already presumed some opinion and then just gladly accepted the result since it proved your stereotype on Chinese people?

I strongly suggest that you should re-design the experiment and do similar pilot tests in China. We have similar culture compared to Japan, and it is not fair to make such conclusions.