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Markets Don’t Just Make Money — They Make Kindness
When a letter is lying on the sidewalk, there are two types of people who can find it. There are those who will pick it up and post it in the nearest mailbox, and there are those who will notice it and walk straight past as if it didn’t exist. As long as people don’t heartlessly kick or destroy the letter, they can belong to either group without necessarily being evil. But psychologists have used this lost-letter experiment to investigate people’s levels of altruism.
In a lost-letter experiment, researchers will drop stamped and addressed envelopes on sidewalks across a town or city. By counting the number of letters returned by passersby to the address on the envelope, they gain an insight into how willing people are to help a stranger’s letter get to its rightful home. The higher the rate of return in a particular neighborhood, the more altruistic its residents are considered to be.
In a study published in February, 2020, Delia Baldassarri — a professor at NYU — used this lost-letter method to test whether there’s a connection between how altruistic people are and how integrated they are within a market economy. Generally speaking, people need to be able to rely on each other when they regularly exchange goods or services. It’s hard to do business with someone you don’t trust. So one logical hypothesis would be that people who are…
