Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Unraveling Controversies Over Civic Honesty Measurement: An Extended Field Replication In China, Qian Yang, Weiwei Zhang, Shiyong Liu, Wenjin Gong, Youli Han, Jun Lu, Donghong Jiang, Jingchun Nie, Xiaokang Lyu, Rugang Liu, Mingli Jiao, Chen Qu, Mingji Zhang, Yacheng Sun, Xinyue Zhou, Qi Zhang

Community & Environmental Health Faculty Publications

Cohn et al. (2019) conducted a wallet drop experiment in 40 countries to measure "civic honesty around the globe," which has received worldwide attention but also sparked controversies over using the email response rate as the sole metric of civic honesty. Relying on the lone measurement may overlook cultural differences in behaviors that demonstrate civic honesty. To investigate this issue, we conducted an extended replication study in China, utilizing email response and wallet recovery to assess civic honesty. We found a significantly higher level of civic honesty in China, as measured by the wallet recovery rate, than reported in the …