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Civic honesty around the globe

(science.sciencemag.org)
209 points ojosilva | 1 comments | 20 Jun 19 19:31 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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oska ◴[20 Jun 19 20:36 UTC] 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 ◴[20 Jun 19 20:47 UTC] 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 ◴[20 Jun 19 21:18 UTC] 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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1. krzyk ◴[21 Jun 19 07:06 UTC] No.20240526[source]▶
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).