Civic honesty around the globe

Although there is robust experimental literature on the conditions that give rise to honest behavior (6–11), little is known about how material incentives impact civic honesty, particularly in field settings. Citizens displayed greater civic honesty when the wallets contained money, but perhaps this is because the amount was not large enough to be financially meaningful. To examine this possibility we also ran a “BigMoney” condition in three countries (US, UK, and Poland) that increased the money inside the wallet to US $94.15, or seven times the amount in our original Money condition.

Source: science.sciencemag.org