Civic honesty around the globe

I don't know why people are so cynical, the results are generally what I would have imagined.

Most interesting - the $13/$100 difference.

Notice that in the US and UK, the 'return rate' goes way up when there's $100 in the wallet, but when only $13 it's quite low.

In Switzerland and Sweden, it's high even for $13.

I think there might be a difference between 'core conscientiousness' and 'meaningful conscientiousness'.

In Sweden and Switzerland, it's a matter of propriety to 'return the wallet'. It's appropriate behaviour. They have smaller, tighter communities, you may even know the person. So they 'just do the right thing' because it doesn't matter what's in the wallet.

In the US/UK culture the thinking might be $13 - nobody is care, it's not worth the hassle to report. But as soon as there's money, then it becomes a material matter of conscientiousness, i.e. 'people will miss $100, it's worth the effort to report it'.

I think $13 is just not really enough money, not that much different from $0. It's almost change.

$100 is a nice, meaningful threshold.

Finally, China ... ouch.

Also, the results are perfectly correlated with transparency international index [1]

It's interesting because it may be that 'corruption' is not just a systematic issue in governance, but it may be correlated or predicted with even more basic levels of civic conscientiousness, as measured by tests such as this.

[1] https://www.transparency.org/cpi2018

I wonder if the fact that physical wallets as a construct are undeniably western affect the study in any way. For example, do people even use wallets in China? They've long since focused on electronic payments as opposed to cash. There's a reason the authors stopped short of making any social commentary in their study.

The Chinese invented paper money :) so it's not as though the concept is foreign to any of them. While there might be some differences between cultures in that regard, I think it's kind of a stretch to try to explain away the not very nice data points. I think the data can probably be interpreted in a straight forward manner: if you lose something in China, you're not going to get it back and that's that. It is what it is.

"There's a reason the authors stopped short of making any social commentary in their study." I think because it would be way out of bounds. Casual commenters such as us have a little space to speculate (unless dang gets fussy), but it'd be too improper for researchers to make assumptions.

One major thing missing in this study is the rural/urban divide. I suggest London is not representative in any way of the rest of the UK, and neither is Manchester the same as Penzance.

Edit: I should note that the authors do indeed go into trying to find cultural correlates, they go right for '% protestant' etc. and make some fairly speculative comments which I would be uncomfortable with because these are all just correlations. Notably, one of the highest 'correlations' is 'latitude' (!), it's not as though being at a certain latitude makes one more civic. Maybe there are other, related, factors, but it's certainly not latitude.