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Civic honesty around the globe

(science.sciencemag.org)
209 points ojosilva | 2 comments | | HN request time: 2.433s | source
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oska ◴[] No.20237085[source]
A bit odd that they didn't include Japan in their set of countries. My expectation is that it would have probably topped the list.
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davetannenbaum ◴[] No.20237185[source]
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.
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jagrsw ◴[] No.20237490[source]
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%.

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yoz-y ◴[] No.20239948[source]
10% of cash inside? If so, I wonder how this fee could be amended for people who never carry cash.
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1. mjevans ◴[] No.20240023[source]
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.
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2. dmix ◴[] No.20240340[source]
$20-50 seems like a fine reward for the average person. I’d probably give whatever money was in the wallet to them.