Ordinary Gweilo

Back in 2004, Readers Digest got themselves some free publicity by claiming that 4 out of 5 Hong Kong people would return a wallet to its owner if they found it (though another prominent blogger of the time doubted that this was true – see Too cynical by half).

Now they done it again with an experiment to check whether a mobile phone left in a public place would be returned to its owner.  Hong Kong didn’t do so well this time around, as Reuters reports:

Reporters from the magazine Reader’s Digest planted 960 “lost” cell phones in 30 public places in 32 cities around the world to test people’s reactions in a cell phone honesty test.

They rang the phone as people walked past and watched to see if people would answer the phone, take the phone and attempt to call someone in the pre-programmed contacts later, or simply pocket it.

The most honest city in the survey turned out to be the smallest city in the group, Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana, where 29 of 30 cell phones were returned.

But bigger cities showed they also had trustworthy citizens with Canada’s largest city, Toronto, coming second with 28 of 30 phones returned, followed by Seoul, South Korea, and Stockholm in Sweden.

The Asian cities of Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur didn’t fare so well, tying for worst performance with only 13 of the 30 “lost” phones returned in each city.

Reader’s Digest spokesman William Adler said while the study was not scientific, the results were interesting and indicated that people were more honest than preliminary interviews suggested.

Well,  it’s certainly not scientific.  They don’t say whether people pocketed the phone or simply left it where it was – clearly it is dishonest to take it, but ignoring it is unhelpful rather than dishonest.  How long did they wait for someone to pickup the phone?  Do they know whether people made any effort to return it?   

The report on the Readers Digest website seems to accuse a security guard of trying to steal one phone:

In one particularly egregious Hong Kong incident, a security guard along the city’s Causeway Bay picked up a ringing phone, asked a group of smokers if it was theirs, then wrapped it in a piece of paper. Confronted by the reporter, the guard stammered, “What phone? I didn’t see any phone. If you’ve mislaid something, report it to Lost and Found.” The phone was plainly visible in his hand.

However, there is no explanation about whether this is an isolated example (were there other slightly less egregious incidents, I wonder?).  To be fair, I would assume that the correct procedure would be for the security guard to hand it over to the Lost Property department, and I don’t think we can be clear whether that’s what he really intended to do.

The SCMP muddies the already murky waters by being even more unscientific (HK fails finders-keepers mobile phone test – subscription required):

Adding insult to injury, in Hong Kong it is very difficult to recover a phone left in a taxi without posting a reward.

A South China Morning Post reporter who called the Taxi Union Lost Report Service Centre posing as a passenger who had left her HK$2,400, six-month-old phone in a cab was told to put up a HK$500 reward. “The phone will be worth something, and Nokia phones are worth more,” an operator said. “If the driver has to deliver it back to you, you have to give them some sort of reward.”

The operator said the centre received about 50 reports of lost items per day: half of them were mobile phones, and none had ever been recovered without a reward.

I don’t think they mean “adding insult to injury” do they?

It’s a non-story because they asked one operator rather than an official spokesman, and appear to have assumed that what they have been told must be true.  However, the statistics don’t surprise me:  I have only used that service once to try to recover something I lost, and I wouldn’t bother again – I had to pay them first, and I heard no more once they had my money. 

On the other hand, I don’t think we can assume from this that taxi drivers are dishonest.  I have had one taxi driver return a phone I left behind (he delivered it back to me and refused any payment or reward) and someone called me when they found my wallet in a taxi.  So there certainly are plenty of honest people in Hong Kong, and phones do get returned without any reward being paid.