04-27-2006
This Just In: People Suck Less Than Previous Thought
So today for the second in a year and a half I lost my wallet. It was even more my fault this time (it helps to put the wallet BACK in your pocket after using the change machine). For the second time in a year and a half, it was returned: intact. Now I’m very glad it worked out this way and very grateful to the person who to the time to turn it in. This is about the time you’d expect me to start talking about my restored faith in humanity (well if you haven’t been here very long, it’s what you’d expect). If you know me at all you know I’m not gonna do that.
Two thoughts did occur to me however. The first of these is that wallet- returning is in everyone’s rational self-interest. Consider what is the profit of not returning the wallet. Well the amount of cash in the average wallet is small. The risk of getting caught from just taking the cash is also small (though not zero). Taking the credit/debit cards would present a much bigger payoff, but also a much being risk. While credit card fraud is a big problem, it is much more the case of a small number of individuals defrauding a large number of credit cards than the reverse. With merchant’s so conscious of fraud, the average person trying to use a stolen credit card would get caught very quickly. Therefore this risk ought to dissuade one rationally from taking the credit cards, but why not take the cash? Yes, there are obviously emotional reasons for not taking, but I’d argue there is a rational self -interest motivation for
Consider the following assumptions: 1) In general,a person who has their wallet returned is MUCH more likely to return a wallet they find and 2) Wallet loss happens with some certain frequency(I don’t want to do the math of this but if we assume that in a society on average a person will lose 1 wallet and find 1 wallet, it should be sufficient). Note that for the argument to work it’s not necessary that it hold for ALL people or even that it holds for a particular wallet -finders. What matters is that a wallet finder believes it holds of MOST people, which I think is reasonable. Given that, how do you maximize the chances your lost wallet will be returned? By helping to maximize the number of lost wallets returned generally.
How can returning just one wallet do that? Well it’s not bloody likely the same person whose wallet you find and return will find and return YOUR wallet. But, by 2 , it is likely there will find A wallet and by 1 it is likely they will return it. Then it’s likely that there person will find and return a wallet and so on and so on. One big chain of wallet returning goodness. But this only works if wallets are returned generally, break the chain and you decrease the likelihood that the person who finds your wallet will return it.
I say people suck less than expected, not because they’re more compassionate than expected, though I’m sure whoever returned mine was, but rather on the idea that they won’t let a small low risk profit override what’s really in their long term best interest. Who knew?
-CI
