How Do Other People Think?
We're not as different from others, down deep, as we probably think we are.
A few months ago, driving along one day, I spotted a thick wallet in the road. I stopped quickly, retrieved it and threw it in the passenger seat. When I got home with it, I noticed it held $350 in cash and multiple credit cards, identification, social security card, etc. etc.
Truthfully, I weighed it in my mind. I was at a point where that $350 would have been a helpful bonus. I was tempted, but keeping would not have been honest and would have left me with a burden of guilt. I went to the post office, paid in cash from the wallet for postage to the address on the driver’s license in the wallet.
A few days later, I was relating the experience to a group of friends, and one of them said with certainty, “Most people would’ve kept all of it.” Knowing him, I knew he would have returned it, probably in person.
I was slightly taken aback by his comment, and I thought at the time that he was wrong about “most people,” and maybe a bit cynical. But, I actually agreed with him.
Then, I Found This Book
In this book, Dr. Todd Rose exposes the basis for the statement my friend made. His pronouncement that most people would have kept the money was based on no real data. Not that my pal was unusual. I thought the same way. We all think we know what others would do in certain situations, but our opinions are usually, and often, provably, incorrect. We distrust when we shouldn’t, and it’s part of the problem of division in our own society right at this moment in time.
If you happen to be fascinated by the study of people, in general, and why we are the way we are, buy this book. You’ll love it. Published in 2022, this is a well-written and entertaining treatment of discoveries made about how we judge others, along with solutions to correcting situations our misjudgments foster. Not surprisingly, we see most others as being different from ourselves, especially when it comes to morality. Often, we are not right. Consider, for example, my friend’s statement about the wallet full of cash—his view (and mine) that most people would have kept all the money. Turns out, there’s a study, and a story, on just that situation. First, the story.
Joe Cornell. An Honest Man.
Joe Cornell, a meth addict, was living in a Salvation Army Rehab Center in Fresno, California, and trying to kick the meth habit. One day, he found a sack of $125,000 in cash that had been left behind by a Brink’s truck. He returned it. His reason? He said to a local news station that he was “afraid people might lose their jobs if the money was lost.”1 (And, yes, he was rewarded by Brink’s.)
Was Joe an outlier? Would most people return money they found when they could have remained unknown? It seems that most people would return the money, or strive to do so. Why? Same reason I did: they have to look at themselves in the mirror, and what they want to see is a person they consider to be honest. A “good guy.” They want to avoid feeling ashamed of themselves. It seems that, in more of us than not, the urge to “do the right thing” is strong. It is stronger than greed or need, and it is more prevalent than most of us think it is.
The study was titled “Civic Honesty Around the Globe,”2 I’ll quote from the book about it because author Todd Rose tells it much more succinctly than I would.
“In a 2019 study published in Science, researchers sought to answer this very question. Experimenters turned in wallets they pretended to have found on the street to the folks working at front desks in 350 cities around the world. Each wallet contained a clear ID, an email address, and a grocery list. Some contained no cash; others held about $13; still others contained $100. The researchers wanted to see whether the recipients of the lost wallets would actually try to contact the fictitious owners.
And what did they find? In almost every country, people tried to return the wallets. When the wallets contained the greatest amount of money, they tried even harder to reach the owner. And when the wallets contained a key-something that mattered only to the owner—they tried hardest of all.”3
Most people returned the wallets, or tried very hard to do so. Wallets with the more money were returned most often. This was apparently a surprise to the researchers, who might have tended to think as my friend did, that people would more likely keep the money. They, too, apparently considered that they had to confront themselves in the mirror every day, just as I had with the wallet.
“The researchers concluded that a large majority of ourselves like to think of ourselves as honest, moral and altruistic, even though we may not think the same things of others. In short, we’re actually a lot like Joe (Cornell).” 4
Trust, Distrust, and “Those Other Guys”
We tend to take sides, don’t we? Whether we think we’re “better than most people” in some ways, or whether we think “most people are better than me” in some ways, we just routinely differentiate ourselves, thinking others are not like us. Are we more honest, more moral, wiser, friendlier, more polite, or better or worse than others? Are we better drivers? More level-headed? More often “right” than those we disagree with?
Although there were many interesting and surprising anecdotes in Collective Illusions, my general takeaway from the book is that the knowledge of our all-too-human proclivity for judging the majority of “others,” is most important in regard to moral judgments. But it also has much to do with our political views and important issues we consider on a daily basis. Too often, our differences of opinion and judgment result in abiding distrust toward others, their opinions, and even their facts.
Mark Twain said, “The problem isn’t so much what people don’t know, it’s what they know that isn’t so.”
He also said, “It is better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
But we have to take that chance if we are ever to communicate and settle differences.
Silence
On Wednesday, January 3, Glenn Beck’s Wednesday Night Special on Blaze TV was done from the TV set of “All In The Family,” (which is now part of Beck’s American History Museum). On that set, we saw Archie Bunker and Meathead argue about every issue of the day. Many young people don’t know what that show was all about, but it was as Beck says, an example we would do well to emulate. On that show, they argued and got angry—but they communicated with each other. If we don’t talk frankly with one another, like they did on that fictional sitcom, we will never close the gulf that yawns between us right now. There are too many factions and we are so far apart that it seems conversation is nearly impossible. But, even though “they” think “we” are fools, and “we” think “they” are crazy, we need to hash things out.
Silence is not our friend. It delivers neither confirmation nor contradiction, when one or the other if voiced might lead to a settlement of problems, or at least understanding between the opposing sides.
In the book, Todd Rose calls us all out for staying silent at times because we are afraid to stand out in a crowd, to take a chance on being the fool in Twain’s quote. We should take that chance.
Collective Illusions, page 179; (hardcover edition)
Alain Cohn et al., “Civic Honesty Around the Globe,” Science 365, no. 6448 (2019); 70-73.
Collective Illusions, page 180.
Alain Cohn et al., “Civic Honesty Around the Globe,” Science 365, no. 6448 (2019); 70-73.