I recently was reminded of this article

[conuly]

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/20/734141432/what-dropping-17-000-wallets-around-the-globe-can-teach-us-about-honesty

Every time I think about it, I wonder if all economists are amoral jerks, or just the ones involved in this study.

"People were more likely to return a wallet when it contained a higher amount of money," Cohn says. "At first we almost couldn't believe it and told him to triple the amount of money in the wallet. But yet again we found the same puzzling finding."

There's nothing puzzling about this finding! Obviously you're going to make more of an effort to return a wallet that has money in it instead of a wallet with no money in it! Obviously you're going to try harder if it's a lot of money rather than just a couple of bucks! Because most people aren't total assholes! Heck, even assholes usually have some standards of basic human decency.

I don't understand how we can trust economists to have any understanding of how money works when, if articles in the popular press are any indication, they have no understanding of how humans work. Like, fundamentally, I don't know how they were surprised by this result. Years after first reading that article, I still do not get it.

Comments

[pauamma]

Is your impression based on the actual academic article published in Science, or what NPR made of it? More often than not, there's a substantial difference between what academic articles actually say (or don't say) and how they're reported in mainstream media.

[conuly]

Oh, no, it's definitely the reporting by NPR - but unless they straight up invented that quote, I'm still baffled.

[pauamma]

My guess is the NPR writer and or editor blew it up out of proportion with little or no context. The Science article says

Although there is robust experimental literature on the conditions that give rise to honest behavior (6–11), little is known about how material incentives affect civic honesty, particularly in field settings. Understanding the relationship between civic honesty and material incentives is not only practically relevant but also theoretically important.

and (crucially) Theories of honesty make different predictions about the role of material incentives. (emphasis mine) and the rest of the next paragraph of the abstract.

[melannen]

I will say that the fact they turned them in to employees is pretty significant to the results, compared to, say, dropping them on the street. I work in a job where we do get things like that turned in pretty regularly, and while honesty is certainly part of the equation, we do have actual employee policy around lost money turned into us, with repercussions if we're caught out not following it. (And we're expected to put more effort into finding the owner the more valuable something is - if someone turns in a wallet with no credit cards and less than $20 it just goes into the lost and found for a couple months and then the charity donation bin after; if it's $100 we're supposed to make a serious effort to find the person and keep the money accounted for.) Like, that's not just me being an altruistic human, when I'm behind the desk I'm not a human I'm an employee and it's explicitly part of my job duties as front-desk customer service.

(it's also often regular customers who lose stuff and the nicer you are to your regular customers, the more likely they bring you donuts later and then talk you up to your boss. A lot of the "altruism vs self-interest" questions economists ask have a really unimaginative definition of self-interest. )

(also in a lot of places you can actually be charged with theft for keeping a lost wallet if there's a reasonable expectation you could have returned it.)