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On my way home this evening, a complete stranger told me that I was unusually honest. I hope not.
What prompted this was that, as he went through the turnstile, some money fell out of his pocket, and he didn't notice. I reflexively said "Sir!" and he turned around, saw it, picked it up, and complimented me. What I have is good reflexes: the top-of-brain reflex is "someone has dropped something, tell them about it," not any kind of sorting. I told him something like "It's your money, not mine," which was true, but not entirely relevant: I hadn't stopped to think about whether to tell him, I just told him, as I would have if it had been a piece of paper with a phone number written on it, or a bag almost left behind on the train seat (as, come to think, the person sharing my seat on the railroad had done ten minutes earlier).
Earlier in the day, I saw that someone had left her wallet in the bathroom at work. In that case, I made a deliberate decision to pick it up, look at her ID, and call her to tell her I'd found it. But while there was a moment of "you know, if I took the money nobody would know" (quickly squelched because I would have known, and had to live with it), the actual decision wasn't whether to steal her cash, it was whether to take the trouble to find her or just leave it there and assume that either she'd come back or someone else would find it and call her. And that was a fairly quick decision, both because I knew it probably wouldn't be a lot of trouble and because the next person might not be stopped by the need to live with herself if she took the money (or, for that matter, the credit cards).
What prompted this was that, as he went through the turnstile, some money fell out of his pocket, and he didn't notice. I reflexively said "Sir!" and he turned around, saw it, picked it up, and complimented me. What I have is good reflexes: the top-of-brain reflex is "someone has dropped something, tell them about it," not any kind of sorting. I told him something like "It's your money, not mine," which was true, but not entirely relevant: I hadn't stopped to think about whether to tell him, I just told him, as I would have if it had been a piece of paper with a phone number written on it, or a bag almost left behind on the train seat (as, come to think, the person sharing my seat on the railroad had done ten minutes earlier).
Earlier in the day, I saw that someone had left her wallet in the bathroom at work. In that case, I made a deliberate decision to pick it up, look at her ID, and call her to tell her I'd found it. But while there was a moment of "you know, if I took the money nobody would know" (quickly squelched because I would have known, and had to live with it), the actual decision wasn't whether to steal her cash, it was whether to take the trouble to find her or just leave it there and assume that either she'd come back or someone else would find it and call her. And that was a fairly quick decision, both because I knew it probably wouldn't be a lot of trouble and because the next person might not be stopped by the need to live with herself if she took the money (or, for that matter, the credit cards).
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