What the Bagel Man Saw - An Accidental Glimpse at Human Nature

http://www.stephenjdubner.com/journalism/bagelman.html

by adam • 15 years ago

199 42 15 years ago

kghose• 15 years ago

This was a very interesting article. I always find experiments involving honor systems very fascinating. The bus system in Germany and some parts of the Boston T (the trolleys when they are overground) are basically honor systems. In Bonn, Germany people are very particular about paying the fare. In Boston, not so much.

ul5255• 15 years ago

When my in-laws first saw the honor based public transport system in Munich/Germany they commented that this would probably not work in their home city Taipei/Taiwan.

mc323• 15 years ago

Yeah, MUNI(cipal railways) of SF, which uses a kind of honor system for buses and above ground LRVs, have a fare evasion rate of 15 to 30%, based on MTA estimates.

http://missionlocal.org/2009/08/muni-fare-beaters-slapped-wi...

Local activists typically lobby against enforcement as they interpret it as targeting a vulnerable population. On the other hand, MUNI is running a deficit.

willyt2• 15 years ago

Rome has(had?) an honour system for public transport too. We didn't realise that no one ever pays unless they see inspectors getting on the bus. Lots of people would leap up and punch their biglietti when we punched ours because they assumed we had seen some inspectors. I couldn't work out what was going on until I read about it in the Time Out guide which explained that almost no one pays :-)

London had exactly the same system and the same fare evasion problem on the high traffic bendy bus routes. These routes were always overcrowded probably because of the number of unrecorded passengers using them. They withdrew these buses and replaced them with ones which take longer to board partly because of the fare evasion and partly because a sort of bizarre bus xenophobia (hatred of a foreign european style of bus) inspired by the Evening Standard which resulted in an election promise by mayor Boris to get rid of them.

keithpeter• 15 years ago

We have bendy buses in Birmingham UK (route 66). They seem no less popular than other buses. People enter via front and leave via back so passes must be shown to driver and (exact) fare paid. I shall ride them with pride if Boris does not like them...

akadruid1• 15 years ago

I can't speak for their motivation, but the what the Evening Standard (and Metro et al) printed was not related to the origins of the bus. They claimed they were dangerous to other road users. TfL disputes this.

Solving the overcrowding issue is more complicated than building higher capacity buses - you have to think about the speed of boarding, route layout, speed of navigating London's congested streets, fare evasion and more. In some places, the bus stops allow for two bendy buses or 3-4 regular buses to board at once, which means faster boarding on regular buses during peak times.

The new Routemasters, with 3 doors and 2 staircases, might prove to reduce overcrowding despite their lower capacity.

funkah2• 15 years ago

I noticed there is quite a bit of speeding in this article which is concerned with small crimes. Presumably that's OK because there isn't victim involved.

mc323• 15 years ago

Speeding isn't a criminal offense. It's an infraction of the vehicle code.

nkurz2• 15 years ago

Whether speeding is criminal depends on where you are, and the speed you are travelling. One might make a similar argument that an 'honor box' is a 'suggested donation', and that one is simply choosing not to donate. You could probably even argue that it _must_ be considered a voluntary donation as evidenced by the failure to collect the required sales tax.

I think 'funkah' has a point. There are lots of things happening in this article, and it's fair to look at the situation from a different perspective than the primary. As a California business owner, I didn't notice the speeding, but did wonder about whether or not DC required him to have health and vending permits for each of his locations, and whether the legality of his business should affect our conclusions: is it more or less ethically acceptable to 'steal' a donut from an 'illegal' business?

r00fus• 15 years ago

I wonder how the payment rates would change if he simply mounted a non-functional wireless camera plugged into a socket pointing at the bagel location?

(ie, hinting to people that they are not invisible as in the story of the Ring of Gyges)

CWuestefeld2• 15 years ago

I wonder how the payment rates would change if he simply mounted a ... camera

An interesting question. I wouldn't be surprised if the camera made it worse. My guess is that people, when trusted, hold themselves to a higher standard. But with a camera present, they're allowed to turn off their own consciences. So people would be ingenious about palming a bagel so the camera wouldn't see, and think that if the camera's not seeing it, they're home free.

JimDabell• 15 years ago

This has actually been studied:

http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/melissa.bateson/Bateson_etal_2006...

> We examined the effect of an image of a pair of eyes on contributions to an honesty box used to collect money for drinks in a university coffee room. People paid nearly three times as much for their drinks when eyes were displayed rather than a control image. This finding provides the first evidence from a naturalistic setting of the importance of cues of being watched, and hence reputational concerns, on human cooperative behaviour.

GBond• 15 years ago

Payment rates would change but my guess is sales would be hurt. I think people will be turned off by the implied message that their company could not be trusted and would punish Bagel Guy by not giving their business.

pbhjpbhj• 15 years ago

>if he simply mounted a non-functional wireless camera

Cheaper still, a sign saying "this break room is under video surveillance".

He could try all sorts of things in different locations, like starting a rumour that management watched for non-payment to decide who should be laid off first, etc..

ajays• 15 years ago

"Paul F. has noted a strong correlation between high payment rates and an office where people seem to like their boss and their work."

I wonder if this could be a way for companies to figure out (surreptitiously) how managers are doing: provide such a bagel service to each department, and see where the theft rate is the highest. Of course, it has to be done completely incognito, otherwise the managers would make sure that the cash box is stuff full of cash....

Tyrannosaurs2• 15 years ago

Given that he also noticed a correlation with weather, overall economic conditions, global events and myriad other factors, you'd need to work very very hard to isolate only what was down to the manager.

Plus most people respond primarily to their direct manager and most direct managers have relatively few reports (typically less than 20). Statistically that's going to make it hard to find significant findings given the variation that is normally seen.

Or think of a team which, for no reason of the manager's making had one inherently dishonest employee who steals all the time. That manager is on -5% before he does a thing - a big disadvantage given the variations being discussed.

EDIT: Not to mention the fact that this is one of his "intuitive conclusions" - which I'm reading as he has no solid data to support the level of liking / not liking their boss, or possibly whether it was even true.

pavel_lishin• 15 years ago

"According to our studies, either you're fired, or it's raining."

gcb2• 15 years ago

If you provide the service to a few teams/companies, you can rule out.the noise

bdunbar• 15 years ago

I wonder if this could be a way for companies to figure out (surreptitiously) how managers are doing

You can get a gut feeling by examining the coffee mess.

If you find that people are leaving less than one cup or less in the bottom of the pot, and it's not yet lunch, that's a sign you've got morale problems.

Happy people make more coffee for their peers. Unhappy people take a cup for themselves and let someone else do it.

Natsu• 15 years ago

It would fail after people learned how they were being graded. See also: Goodhart's Law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

dugmartin• 15 years ago

I've read this story before and wondered then if he would have made a cardboard cutout of himself smiling with outstretched hands and put it behind the bagels (so it looked like he was offering them) if his payment rate would have gone up.

funkah2• 15 years ago

I remember reading this in Freakonomics but with a bit more embellishment. I remember that when the payment rates started to sag, he would put a picture of eyes by the money box, and that often helped the rate rise again.

A bored office worker could do a bit of his own experimentation in this vein -- how many donuts do people buy when there's a fake rubber cockroach near the box? A picture of a severely obese person, or a very fit person, or a salad?

dpatru• 15 years ago

I wonder if the theft rate is differs between donuts and bagels. Are people who choose healthier food more honest?

SeanLuke2• 15 years ago

I think it would surprise you which has more calories, a plain bagel or a glazed yeast donut.

robobenjie• 15 years ago

about the same number of calories, (224 calories in a donut, 207 in a bagel) but those calories come from sugar and fat in the donut (4 times the sugar and 12 times the amount of fat).

Sources:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=calories+in+a+donut http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=calories+in+a+bagel

chaostheory• 15 years ago

Nice story, but how do we know it's real? There's no data and all the names have been changed.

jeff_5nines• 15 years ago

Execs and higher paid people are less likely to carry cash on them as lower paid people. I wonder if this make theft, not making it any more ethical, but more likely to occur in moments of weakness. And what about the Whimpy effect of 'gladly pay you Tuesday' for bagel today. Are there make up payments being made?

jackfoxy• 15 years ago

> could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed? ... Paul F. ... knows that the answer, at least 89 percent of the time, is yes.

Coincides remarkably with what a former fraud investigator once told me, that 11% of the population is sociopaths.

aaronharnly• 15 years ago

What makes me sad in reading this article is that the man set out to respect people's good nature with his honor system, but (at least in the telling) became a bit of a nag, obsessed with measuring and haranguing cheats.

corporalagumbo• 15 years ago

Wow, I read this article and immediately thought: this is the future of digital media economies.

It's obvious that in the long run, it will be impossible to force people to pay for digital media. The only alternative is coercive, expensive, leak-prone control of the internet by governments, and I just don't see that as feasible in the long-term.

So, asking people to please be honest is basically the only alternative.

Look at Louis CK's experiment, or the Humble Indie Bundle, or Radiohead's In Rainbows, all those years ago. What were they doing? They were leaving out a bunch of bagels, and a box with a slot in it, and saying "Hey, we're not going to watch you, but we'd really appreciate it if you paid for your bagel."

Some further thoughts:

1) With digital bagel selling, the bagels are infinite, and the potential office size is the entire world.

2) With digital bagel selling, a recommended price can be asked for the bagel, but customers are encouraged to pay as much as they feel willing to give.

3) Similarly, digital bagel sellers such as Louis CK have used guilt-tripping to attempt to raise payment rates. Saying "I worked hard on this, I'm not asking for that much, I would really appreciate it if you supported me" - making an appeal to people's sense of fairness and generosity - must increase payment rates (/decrease theft)

4) What other factors might influence payment rates in digital selling, and might it be possible to account for these factors - to adjust selling techniques depending on the "digital weather"? For instance, given enough data, could you correlate payment rates to internet activity - maybe someone who looks at lots of pictures of Lolcats is more likely to pay - or someone who has read lots of depressing news articles is less likely to pay - or maybe someone literally browsing in a place where the weather is shit is less likely to pay? Could you tweak it so that someone is most likely to see an ad/link for your digital bagels when the digital weather is optimal?

5) By always starting selling as digital bagels, sellers can prevent the worst excesses of the torrent cycle. If you try and lock digital bagels into the traditional payment model, they will almost certainly instantly appear in torrents, at which point, all potential buyers will be faced with a choice - buy at the set price from the standard outlet or sneak around to the backdoor torrent outlet. By setting up a digital bagel shop, you can let those who would not pay anyway do so, immediately, making it less likely for anyone to set up a backdoor torrent. Why torrent a digital bagel when it can be downloaded for free, in a pristine copy, from the official outlet? Preventing the runaway torrent cycle means that all customers, payers and non-payers, will be exposed to the optimum conditions for inducing payment - resulting in the highest potential returns.

6) How do we calculate a reasonable return for digital bagel selling? Beyond paying for hosting and bandwidth, there is no cost for selling/giving away 10,000 digital bagels vs 100,000 digital bagels. How much should creators of media be paid - how do we calculate how much they deserve to be paid?

Much of this I am sure is what the people at Humble Indie Bundle spend a lot of time thinking about. But it is clear to me that the SOPA-path is not a tenable future for the internet (my native New Zealand has unfortunately already gone down this path). Worldwide free or next-to-free circulation of cultural goods is a net good for society. More people reading more, watching more, thinking more, means potentially more people more educated and aware than ever before - and people creating more fantastic things than ever before.

But we are being dragged away from this path by those who reaped fat rewards from the old system, when commodity sold was linked to cost of production, and physical formats meant IP enforcement was still feasible. The stalwarts of the old system are not willing to consider the reformulations of basic economic strategy necessary to take advantage of the new situation.

Hopefully we end up with a free internet, where everyone sells their own digital bagels, and people are on the whole honest and generous! Fingers crossed.

What the Bagel Man Saw - An Accidental Glimpse at Human Nature

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