Civic honesty around the globe

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.

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.

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

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.