ALTRUISTIC HONESTY Be Honest Despite Greater Reward for Dishonesty

Abstract

The first of its kind Global Experiment on Honesty conducted by Researchers from US and Switzerland at a global scale across 355 cities in 40 countries revealed that altruism and desire not to be perceived as a Thief are more powerful than the lure of easy money. This is just opposite to conventional thinking about human response to Temptation and Financial Incentives on its head. This is corroborated by the findings of this experiment.Prof. Alain Cohn from the University of Michigan and his counterparts from Switzerland dropped off 17000 wallets at various public locations like banks, post offices, museums, movie theatre, grocery stores, and offices. Each wallet had in it a shopping list, a key, three business cards, and an e-mail address. While some wallets were empty, others had equivalent of US $13.45. Results showed that while 40 per cent tried to return empty wallets, 51 per cent contacted the owners of wallets containing cash.After conducting the experiment, researchers asked nearly 300 professional Economists to predict the outcome of their study. What baffled them was that only 29 per cent of them were accurate. This only indicates that even Experts tend to have cynical intuition about other people’s motivations, often exaggerating the role of financial incentives and underestimating the role of psychological forces. In addition, there are several other factors like educational levels, political systems, and cultural values that also play key role in Altruistic Honesty. People in countries that are more democratic tend to be more honest. More interesting findings are shown in the Graphic table.