Researchers at the University of East Anglia assessed how people in different countries value honesty and found that people in the United Kingdom and Japan were most likely to be truthful compared to people in China and Turkey.
Through an online survey, the researchers asked about 1,500 people from 15 different countries to answer two quizzes that measured honest behavior. The study also aimed to see whether there were any link between honesty and the economic development of a country.
The study, entitled "Honesty and beliefs about honesty in 15 countries", included respondents from Argentina, Brazil, China, Denmark, Greece, India, Japan, Portugal, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, Turkey, the UK and the United States.
Participants in the online survey were first asked to flip a coin and state whether they got heads or tails. They knew that a reward of $3 or $5 was waiting if it landed on heads. Researchers said that if more than half of the participants in a certain country reported heads, this showed that they were being dishonest.
In this first survey, about 3.4 percent of respondents in the UK were dishonest while in China, 70 percent of respondents manifested dishonesty, researchers said.
The second part of the survey involved extremely difficult questions related to music. Again, if the participants answered the questions correctly, they would be given a reward. Participants were not allowed to search for the answers on the Internet. They also had to tick a box to confirm they would answer the questions on their own without the help of the Internet. Three of the questions were deliberately difficult so participants would really need to search for the answers. Getting one of these questions right indicated dishonesty.
In this second quiz, respondents in Japan were the most truthful, researchers said, while respondents in Turkey were the least truthful. The UK came in second most truthful next to Japan.
Aside from the two tests, participants were also asked to rate the average honesty of people from other countries by guessing how many participants out of 100 would report getting heads in the coin flip test.
"Surprisingly, people were more pessimistic about the honesty of people in their own country than of people in other countries," said Dr. David Hugh-Jones, an economics lecturer at the UEA.
Hugh-Jones said that the link between economic growth and honesty in countries had become weaker over the past 60 years, and there was little evidence to prove that these two factors were indeed related. He explained that when institutions and technology are underdeveloped, honesty is important as a substitute for formal contract enforcement. Meanwhile, countries that focus on developing cultures which put a high value on honesty are able to reap economic gains, he added.
Photo: Jon Gos | Flickr
