Scientists have compiled a "civic integrity rating" of countries by conducting field tests.
"Honest" five - Switzerland, Norway, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden. The most "shameless" countries are China, Morocco, Peru, Kazakhstan and Kenya. Russia in this ranking, which was compiled by American and Swiss scientists led by Alain Cohn of the University of Michigan (School of Information, University of Michigan), Russia took 15th place - not honorable, but not ashamed either.
The level of honesty was determined by no means laboratory - by means of various economic models. Or games. Researchers first came out, as they say, in humans and conducted experiments in real conditions. They directly found out in which cases the subjects chosen at random will act honestly, and in which cases they will behave shamelessly. Namely: how will someone else's wallet be disposed of - someone lost? Will they try to return it to the owner? Or will they keep it for themselves?
Experimenting, Cohn and his colleagues traveled 40 countries, visited 355 cities and "lost" more than 17,000 wallets in total. Some had money - about $ 100 in local currency. Others are empty. In some wallets, scientists put keys and a shopping list. And they all had business cards with the owner's address and phone number. That is, the finder could easily contact the "confusion".
Bearing in mind that not everyone will pick up a wallet lying around, the experimenters did the following: they passed the "find" to some manager - a bank, hotel, government agency, company, assuring that they had found a wallet on the street. Then we watched how he would act.
The scientists published the results of the experiments in the journal Science. They are as follows: wallets with money were returned more often than empty ones. Peru and Chile dropped out of the general trend. In these countries, the contents of the wallet were almost irrelevant. They rarely gave away, but if this happened, then the wallet got to the owner, regardless of whether there was money in it or not. Similarly behaved in Argentina, Poland, Ghana and Kenya.
It seems that the keys found in the wallet were equated with money by the finder. Or even put it higher. Because wallets with keys were returned just as often as with money.
Having determined the percentage of "unhealed" wallets - empty and with money, the scientists calculated the very level of civic honesty of a particular country, which made it possible to draw up the corresponding rating. For example, in Russia, they returned half of the empty wallets found and about 60 percent with money. The desired level is the average. About 55 percent.
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Honesty rating compiled by scientists. The X-axis is the percentage of returned wallets.
In China, civic honesty is minimal - about 14 percent. The maximum - in Switzerland - more than 75 percent. Although wallets with money or keys were returned the most in Denmark - more than 80 percent of the time.
The conclusion that Cohn and his colleagues drew: there are still people who show decency even when they are tempted. For example, easy money. “Honesty sometimes knocks at their hearts,” one can say about such people, to slightly paraphrase Woland from “The Master and Margarita”.
The far-reaching goals of scientists: to find ways to change the surrounding social environment so that people act contrary to their selfish interests. Showed civic responsibility in the broadest sense of the word.
QUOTE IN THE TOPIC
“… Then something banged on the site. Hearing that the steps were quieting, Annushka, like a snake, slipped out from behind the door, put the can against the wall, fell belly on the platform and began to fumble. In her hands was a napkin with something heavy. Annushka's eyes went up to her forehead as she unwrapped the bundle. Annushka brought the jewel up to her very eyes, and these eyes burned with an absolutely wolfish fire. A blizzard formed in Annushka's head: “I don’t know anything! I know nothing!.. To my nephew? Or cut it into pieces … You can pick out the pebbles … And one pebble at a time: one on Petrovka, the other on Smolensk … And - I don't know anything, and I know nothing!"
Annushka hid the find in her bosom, grabbed the can and was about to slip back into the apartment, postponing her journey to the city, when he grew up in front of her, the devil knows where he came from, the one with a white chest without a jacket and quietly whispered:
- Give a horseshoe and a napkin.
- What kind of horseshoe napkin? - asked Annushka, pretending to be very skillful, - I don't know any napkins. What are you, citizen, drunk, or what?
The white-breasted one, firm as the rail of a bus, and equally cold fingers, without saying anything more, squeezed Annushka's throat so that he completely stopped any access of air to her chest. The can fell out of Annushka's hands onto the floor. After holding Annushka out of air for a while, the jacketless foreigner removed his fingers from her neck. Taking a sip of air, Annushka smiled.
“Oh, a horseshoe,” she began, “this very minute! So is this your horseshoe? And I look, lies in a napkin … I deliberately tidied up so that someone would not pick it up, and then remember what your name was!
Bulgakov's Annushka would have spoiled our rating.
Having received a horseshoe and a napkin, the foreigner began to bow before Annushka, firmly shake her hand and warmly thank her in such expressions, with a strong foreign accent:
- I am deeply grateful to you, madam. This horseshoe is dear to me as a memory. And allow me to give you two hundred rubles for keeping it. - And he immediately took money out of his vest pocket and handed it to Annushka …"
(M. Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, chapter 24)
VLADIMIR LAGOVSKY