Picture this: You're working a slow shift in a hotel lobby when someone rushes up to the front desk. They find a lost wallet around the corner, but they're in a hurry and don't have time to follow up.
They ask if you can handle it and then run away. Looking at the wallet, you see that it contains a key, a grocery list, about $13, and three business cards with the name and email of what you believe to be the owner of the wallet.
So what do you do?
Between 2013 and 2016, more than 17,000 front desk workers worldwide were faced with this choice, becoming unwitting participants in a large-scale honesty study. And the results surprised top economists and experimental researchers.
But to understand what these groups were expecting,
we need to spend a little time appreciating honesty. We usually think of honesty in terms of actively telling the truth in our interpersonal relationships.
But in fact every healthy society relies on a common foundation of honesty. Using public services, conducting business transactions, and deciding on government policies requires a basic expectation of honesty from our fellow citizens.
Because of this, understanding what drives honesty is an important research topic for economists, psychologists, and sociologists.
Unfortunately, investigating honesty can be difficult when people know they are being watched. Therefore, researchers have found clever ways to analyze this behavior outside the laboratory.
And this global study from the universities of Michigan,
Utah, and Zurich sought to answer an important question: Will people engage in opportunistic behavior when there is no chance of getting caught?
Known as the Lost Wallet Test, 13 research assistants traveled to 355 cities in 40 different countries, recreating the same scene in hotels, banks, public offices and various cultural institutions.
Clear wallets ensure that participants can see their contents, half of which contain a key, grocery list and business cards, while the other half contains the equivalent of about US$13.
The researchers believed that money would discourage honesty.
Specifically, they hypothesized that participants' egos would be dominated by two competing factors: their altruistic desire not to harm the wallet's owner, and their desire to maintain a positive self-image.
In terms of self-image, we generally like to think of ourselves as nice and honest. But studies have found that people are often able to let themselves off the hook for small amounts of theft. As for harming the wallet owner, their crime victim will be summary.
They had never met the man, and since the purse had come from somewhere else, it looked like they never would. For these reasons, the researchers expected that wallets full of money would be reported less frequently, and the 279 economists they surveyed agreed.
But to their surprise, the study found just the opposite.
While only 46% of cash-free wallets were reported, 61% of cash wallets were called. This pattern held true across the globe, regardless of participants' age, gender, or when they were being observed leaving their wallets. .
And when the researchers tried increasing the lure of dishonesty with a wallet containing about $100, the results surprised them again. People reported 72% of these big money wallets.
There are many theories as to why honesty increases as the purse becomes more valuable. A $100 wallet definitely boosts the ego.
But in an international follow-up survey, people reported that taking more money felt like stealing, making it harder to maintain a positive self-image.
It is also possible that when the financial stakes are high,
so too is the wallet owner. Others have suggested that our commitment to honesty may be transferable to professional settings, meaning participants may have acted differently outside the office.
Still, this result suggests that selfishness may not be as powerful as we often think. Seeing yourself as an honest person can motivate you to be an honest person.
And by modeling and celebrating this behavior and others, we can help create an honest society we can all trust.
Comments
Post a Comment