

Great Marketing: Honest Tea Tests Wall Street's Honesty - jfi
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/28/honest-tea-tests-wall-str_n_555069.html

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j-g-faustus
A few years back a company in Scandinavia tried to sell candy bars at
workplaces by leaving a tray of candy bars and a jar for the money.

They found that it worked well at low-income workplaces (90-95% honesty) but
poorly at high-income workplaces (20-30% honesty).

It appears that at least by some metrics, honesty is inversely proportional to
income.

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joblessjunkie
This might not be a test of "honesty", but simply a test of the relative value
of money.

The price of a candy bar is more significant to a low-income worker than it is
to a high-income worker, and thus the weight on the conscience when "stealing"
one necessarily has different impact.

If something doesn't seem valuable, it feels "less wrong" to take it.

If the items placed in the high-income workplaces had proportionately higher
value, would the "honesty" increase?

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patio11
I think this is less an honesty thing and more a usability thing. People are
as hidebound and pattern driven in real life as they are on their computers,
right? When you're poor, people don't give you free food. When you're rich,
you get free food all the time.

If you're a Wall Street banker, you could probably never pay for a meal in a
week without even trying to. It is always "Thanks for coming to our
conference: lunch is being served, just walk over to a table", "Don't worry
Bob, the firm has got this dinner.", "Before our meeting, please help yourself
to coffee and snacks.", etc etc. Social food freebies extend pretty far down
into the upper middle class, too: if I walk into any glasses shop in town and
ask them to rebend my frames for me, they'll bring me a coffee and cookies so
I don't get bored while waiting for my free repair to complete.

So when you see a basket of donuts at the office, you assume it is like every
other basket: free. The jar next to it with the sign you didn't read because
_no one reads anything_? Tip jar, obviously, like it was the last 42 times.

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noelchurchill
What I've learned by watching this video: To keep Wall St bankers honest you
need to keep cameras on them, and even then they're only 89% honest.

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thisduck
Yes, hardly scienteafic.

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jquery
To me, this just illustrates the old maxim a fool and their money are soon
parted. In that sense it is more a measure of monetary altruism than honesty.
No surprise that people who value money more than others--Wall Street Bankers
--are less altruistic with it.

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kingsley_20
I'd love to see someone try to sell cars this way in both, a high income as
well as a low income context. Honesty may not be the absolute value we/i'd
like to think it is.

