Imagine this experiment. You have been asked by a team of university researchers to help them with their research. You have agreed to help from home, and email the results you get. The researchers want you to flip a coin, and tell them whether the result is heads or tails. Whatever the result is, they would like you to report it honestly. But they cannot watch you or check if you are telling the truth.
And there is a twist. If you email to say that the coin shows heads, then you will be paid a little money. If you email to say that the coin shows tails, then you will get nothing.
You flip the coin, and it’s tails. Damn it! That’s not fair. Why should you lose the money, just because you were unlucky? What would a British gentleman do? What would a samurai do?
Apparently, a British gentleman would accept his bad luck and email the true result. A samurai would pick up the coin and flip it again until it showed heads...
Let me explain the experiment further. Researchers from the University of Essex in the UK wanted to compare the honesty of people in different countries. So they performed this experiment on thousands of people, across a number of different countries. The countries included Mexico, Peru, South Africa, the UK, Portugal, Switzerland, India, China, Korea, and Japan. They could not test whether any individual person was being honest or not. But by testing large numbers of people, they could estimate what per centage of people were being dishonest. If everyone is being honest, then 50 per cent of the results reported should be heads, and 50 per cent should be tails. In every country, more than 50 per cent of the reported results were heads. But in some countries, the per centage that reported heads was less than 60 per cent, but in others it was more than 70 per cent. In other words, people in some countries were reporting the results more honestly than in other countries.
Britain was one of the most honest countries, according to this test. Japan, along with Korea and China, was one of the most dishonest countries, according to this test. So are the samurai really more dishonest than the British gentlemen?
Maybe the test shows that British people are more honest than Japanese. But maybe it shows some other difference in cultural values. For instance, gambling is mostly illegal in Japan, but is more common in the UK. Perhaps that had an effect on the results. Maybe the fact that the researchers were from a UK university influenced the results (“Why should I tell the truth to these weird foreigners?”) Anyway, I’ll be keeping a tighter hold on my wallet in Japan in future, just in case.
Vocabulary:
to flip a coin – to throw a coin in the air and let it fall randomly on one side or the other
heads and tails – the names for the two sides of a coin, in countries where one side shows the head of an important person (such as the Queen)
Damn it! – an exclamation to show sudden annoyance
weird - strange
No comments:
Post a Comment