Sjuliaaaaa

I do hope people calm down. At least write in English. For me I googled the title after I saw the paper from Science online during weekend. I have one major question: why does failing to send email equal to civic dishonest behavior. How the alternative explanation 'passive waiting strategy' is taken into account in their experiment or is it counted as part of civic dishonesty? I found here the author having fair discussions and being active. Then I started my post. Unfortunately I guess after so many opinions being expressed, some of which with strong emotions, it is too overwhelming for the author of the paper to reply.

Almost agree all except if you lose sthing in China, YOU are going to search for it. One of the social norms is to leave it there, don't pick it up if it's on the floor, so that when people come back it stays where it used to be. Plus passive waiting is the common practice: not your job to find the owner. The silly one who lose the wallet does their own job.

this makes it more difficult to get it back than in some of the top rated countries. Do hope to change. But this is not really about civic honesty.

The world bank tells you half of the Chinese firms have emails but you won't know that far less than that of them ARE WILLING to use it. For taxing, they use super informal wechat group to send around notifications. I doubted if my tax officer remembers his email or has it at all. Regression adjustment or group it as outlier you know the best.

For hotels, I had experience that a 5-star hotel responded my message after almost a month. They have it but not in your way of using it.

Anyway, did you know the reason for their not writing that email?

Yes, they can try many ways to get it done. However, the effort and time that they would pay is indeed diminishing the will to contact the owner. It's not a fair comparison. Even if you give it an email index from world bank, that still doesn't tell how normal citizens' acquaintance in using email.

1) Interesting when you conclude 'dishonesty'with no contacting received. A second explanation would be that people put it to lost and found box or culturally/occupationally have the practice waiting instead of searching for the owner. For Japan you realized that and excluded it. For other countries, the way to deal with unattended belongings might not be as black and white as in Japan but certainly varies. I could also interpret the data as measuring active searching vs passive waiting strategies across countries.

2) I feel dishonesty is a too big word and this title/claim goes too far. I think it more reflects the sense of responsibility of the employees at this particular job. 'Not my business' is different from being dishonest.

The workload, the degree of satisfaction towards the job and even how natural to communicate in English/via email will largely affect whether an employee would send out that email, which isn't part of their duty in their understanding. They might just leave it there at the counter. Again, I won't call that person being dishonest.

3) The nonusual looking of the wallet and the whole act might be more perceived as a spam or fishing for info in certain regions. In deed, when I moved to one big city in the US, I became less willing to reply to missing phone calls compared to a rather spam-free top city of a different country. Your subjects in certain countries might just be very alert to your behavior.