Civic honesty around the globe

Remarkable finding.

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.

> Where does this negative view of people come from?

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.

I'd posit that maybe it's transference from newsworthy cases of loss of property. In burglary cases we read about thieves stealing goods of high-value, so one reasons that the average person is more inclined to steal high-value goods. Whereas the more accurate model is perhaps that most thieves and average people would prefer to steal only what is necessary and convenient, but the value of goods that were not stolen is not reported.