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Civic honesty around the globe

(science.sciencemag.org)
209 points ojosilva | 2 comments | 20 Jun 19 19:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.433s | 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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1. bswbmb ◴[22 Jun 19 18:41 UTC] No.20251035[source]▶
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?
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2. paopaokade ◴[24 Jun 19 05:50 UTC] No.20260836[source]▶
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?