Some days you get more opportunities

[redbird]

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).

Comments

[wouldyoueva.livejournal.com]

I'm with you. If I'm going to compromise my ethics, I want a bigger payoff than a few bucks. I've lost enough stuff, valuable stuff, that I wish everyone would think about selling themselves so cheaply.

Maybe it's cultural--Dave lost his bear backpack when we were in Australia, and we went to the police, not expecting it to be there. And it was! Can you imagine that happening in the USA?

[ckd]

My self-respect is worth more than a few bucks. Sounds like yours is too.

I once lost my Palm in Zurich. After I'd returned to the US, and replaced it, I got a phone call at work (I kept business cards in the case with the Palm, since I usually had it when meeting vendors and such); it was found and returned. I sent a thank-you card with my leftover Swiss francs inside to pay for the postage and "buy yourself a beer on me".

I figure if I keep doing the honest thing when I get the chance, it'll make the world a little better all around, and people will be more likely to return the favor when I need it.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

I can't imagine behaving any other way. In my universe, what you did is standard practice. (I do recognize that my universe is shrinking rapidly, but still ...)

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I think that the average person assumes that the he or she is more honest than the average person. Which means that he or she assumes that the average person is less honest than the average person actually is.

I mean, I can think of a half a dozen times when change or bills fell out of my pockets, and people called my attention to it, and helped me pick it up. Fairly common occurance.

Also, while we're on the subject, it's been my experience that a teenager wearing hip-hop styles is about 90% likely to give up his or her seat on the train to a pregnant woman, elderly person, or person with a cane, and about 60% for someone who just has more packages than he or she does.

It looks to me like most people are honest, decent, polite, and helpful.

[redbird]

That's the thing--I didn't think I was doing anything unusual (and not just because I was operating on automatic) by telling that man he'd dropped money, but he seemed to.

I suspect the "I'm more honest than average" is like the 80 percent of people who believe they are above-average drivers: it may have more to do with self-esteem than with predicting the behavior of other people.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I think nearly everyone is this honest, in fact. I think this is linked to whoever said 'most people think they're more honest than average so most people are actually more honest than people think'. When I had a bag that looked as if it was open when it wasn't, people would stop me very regularly on the tube to tell me that my bag was open.

There's also a link to available time (remember the 'good samaritan' research; if told they're giving a talk on the good samaritan across town and have plenty of time to get there, almost all trainee priests will cross the road to help a person in distress; if told they're giving a talk on the good samaritan across town and are running late, most of them won't.); people do 'good things' when they have time to do them -- if you'd been in a tearing hurry you might well have passed on phoning the person with the wallet, for example.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Ages ago now, when zorinth was a small child in a heavy pushchair, carandol and I were pushing him along by the canal in Lancaster when we found somebody's wallet lying beside the path. We looked at it and saw that it had a university library card, with address, and a credit card and an ATM card. The address was about a mile and a half away, all uphill, and some of it quite steep hill. However, having plenty of time, (I think Alison's dead right about that one) we went up there to return it. Up, and up, and by the time we got all the way up there that pushchair felt very heavy indeed. The person opened the door, snatched the wallet as soon as we offered it, opened it, checked it, and said accusingly "There was thirty pounds in here!" "Not when we found it," I said, but she stared at us distrustfully and then slammed the door. It wouldn't have been any shorter distance back if she'd said thank you, but our feet might have been lighter if our hearts were.

There was a thread on this subject on rasfc once, which is probably still findable with Google Groups, in which several people admitted to having stolen various things in this sort of circumstance, shocking me horribly. Maybe the guy who thought you were unusually honest read that, or has dishonest friends.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

So, I'm glad you did that, because the last time I left something in a bathroom--my organizer--it vanished without a trace within minutes. This in London.

Interestingly, the last time I had something returned--my backpack--to me it was in New York, after my car had been broken into.

[elusis.livejournal.com]

I lost my Jack Skellington umbrella by leaving it in a phone box in London. If only someone had just let it be, I'd have had it back when I returned a few hours later. [sob]

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I've been in both of those situations, and reacted precisely as you did, for the same reasons. Money lying loose on the ground is one thing, but money that you SEE fall out of someone's pocket (and therefore know whose it is) is quite another. And I would still pick up a dropped wallet and either turn it in to the nearest appropriate place (i.e. in an office building, I'd leave it with building security) or take it home, call and make arrangements for its return. My reason would be exactly the same as yours -- because I don't know whether the next person to find it would be someone like me, or someone less honest. (And yes, I've had the "If I took the cash, no one would know" thought too. I think that's a perfectly normal human response. What matters isn't what goes thru your head, it's what you DO.)

Reader's Digest did a study on this, back in the 70s or 80s, and they found that in most places, somewhere between 60% and 80% of the people who found a "dropped" wallet would attempt to return it. I'd like to see a similar study done now, and see if there was any significant difference.