How does the email matter to the civic honesty? A comment on Cohn et al. (2019)

Toan Luu Duc Huynh,Marc Oliver Rieger,Mei Wang

doi:10.1111/basr.12217

Toan Luu Duc Huynh, Marc Oliver Rieger + Show 1 more

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AbstractCohn et al. (2019) designed the field experiment about the lost wallets across 40 countries to examine whether people attempt to contact the owners to return the 17,000 wallets. We discussed the design flaw in their experimental settings by reanalyzing the relationship between the rates of wallet return, in the Cohn et al. (2019)’s data, and the percentage of the Internet penetration (over population) as an upper bound of proportion email users. We found that countries with limited access to email have a lower rate of wallets’ return after controlling other factors. Furthermore, we revisited the Abeler et al. (2019)’s aggregated data to study whether the dishonest behaviors in the laboratory could predict the actual honesty behavior or not. It turns out that what happens in the lab makes no sense to our reality. This comment contributes to the extant literature about an experimental designation for honesty studies.

Highlights

Honesty is not an abstract definition because Burton (1963) indicated that a morally correct conduct would be defined as the honest behavior
The following section will demonstrate our statistical analysis based on correlation and regression between the Internet penetration, proxied for the upper bound of email usage, and the returning rate of lost wallet, considered as the honesty level
Since there is no email usage ratio over the population, our proxy could be considered as an upper bound of proportion email users

Summary

| INTRODUCTION

Honesty is not an abstract definition because Burton (1963) indicated that a morally correct conduct would be defined as the honest behavior. There are only name and email address that are provided in business card This clearly leads to the unrealistic information and impossible task for participants to return a lost wallet. The police officer might wait for someone who lost this wallet to contact the nearest station to pick up Should we consider this behavior as dishonesty? Cohn et al (2019) standardized the consistent settings across countries by using email address, we believe that one communication method might come with a strong confounding factor in the participant's behavior in terms of returning the lost wallet. The following section will demonstrate our statistical analysis based on correlation and regression between the Internet penetration, proxied for the upper bound of email usage, and the returning rate of lost wallet, considered as the honesty level

| FINDINGS

Findings

| DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION