‘In general, do you think most people can be trusted, or, alternatively, that you can’t be too careful when you’re dealing with people?’
This is a standard question to measure trust and has been used in many surveys, over many years, in many countries. What would you answer? Do you trust people? Would you trust them to return your wallet if they found it on the street, with cash in it? Sometimes, when it comes to trust, we don’t give people the credit they deserve.
The Canadian General Social Survey found that people in Toronto believe that the chance of their wallet being returned with the money still in it if found by a stranger is less than 25 per cent. However, when twenty wallets were ‘dropped’ in different locations of Toronto to study the actual number, it turned out that 80 per cent were returned.
The lost wallet experiment – a measure of trustworthiness – was first conducted by Reader’s Digest Europe in 1996. Wallets, each containing cash, a name and an address, were left on streets in twenty cities in fourteen European countries and in a dozen cities in the US. In two countries, all the wallets were returned with the money still inside: Norway and Denmark.
In 2013, Reader’s Digest repeated the experiment. This time, researchers ‘dropped’ twelve wallets in sixteen cities. Each wallet contained a name, a mobile phone number, a family photo, coupons, business cards and the equivalent of $50 in local currency. How many wallets would you expect to be returned with the money still inside them?
So, if you guessed close to 50 per cent across all sixteen countries, you were right. In total, 192 wallets were dropped and 90 were returned.
Number of wallets returned (of twelve)
In Rio, seventy-three-year-old Delma returned a wallet because, as a teen, she had shoplifted a magazine but was found out by her mother and told that that kind of behaviour was unacceptable. The lesson stuck with her. In London, one of the five wallets that were returned was handed in by Ursula, mid-thirties and originally from Poland. ‘If you find money, you can’t assume it belongs to a rich man. It might be the last bit of money a mother has to feed her family,’ she said. In Ljubljana, Manca, a twenty-one-year-old student, returned the wallet with the money. ‘Once, I lost an entire bag,’ she told the researchers, ‘but I got everything back. So I know what it feels like.’
Ursula and Manca obviously have a strong sense of empathy. They put themselves in the shoes of those who had lost the wallet. To me, there is a link between empathy, cooperation and trust. If we have strong empathetic skills, we are more inclined to cooperate than to compete and, when we all cooperate, we are more inclined to trust each other.
That is why, if we choose empathy over selfishness, we will all be better off. If this transmutes into being trustworthy, we will all be better off. If we understand the value of cooperation over competition, we will all be better off. In a society that rests on empathy, cooperation and trust, we will all be better off – and happier.
So, let’s start by being reliable, by keeping our word and keeping secrets if people have confided in us. Loyalty to those not present proves our loyalty to those who are. Being trustworthy is a valuable asset, both in our own life, and to the lives of the people we care about.
Perhaps Mark Twain said it best:
‘If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.’
This makes for an easier, more relaxed and happier life. If that weren’t enough, having empathy may also make us financially better off in the long run. The study ‘Early Social-emotional Functioning and Public Health: The Relationship between Kindergarten Social Competence and Future Wellness’, which was published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2015, followed hundreds of kids from their time in kindergarten to nearly two decades on. The researchers found statistically significant associations between the social and emotional skills the kids demonstrated in kindergarten and their lives as adults in terms of education, employment, substance use, mental health and crime.
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RAISING HAPPINESS
‘Maths and Danish are important, but so are the children’s social skills – and, yes, their happiness.’
Louise is a teacher and, like most Danish teachers, is as concerned with her pupils’ overall well-being and social and emotional development as she is with their academic performance.
Up until recently, the most popular class for kids was ‘klassens time’ – ‘the class’s hour’. It is a weekly lesson in which the teacher and the kids discuss different issues. The kids take turns to bring cake or treats which can be shared during klassens time. The topics discussed could include: Has there been any bullying in the past week? What board game should we buy for the class now that we have saved sufficient money to buy one? Is someone feeling left out? In my opinion, one of the biggest policy mistakes that has been made in Denmark in recent times is a school reform that changed the class hour. From having a dedicated timeslot each week, the class hour is now ‘integrated’ – policy speak for ‘abolished’ – into other subjects.
But still the Danish education system prioritizes the teaching of empathy, and the kids often work in groups – something they will need to learn in order to manage their job in the future but which also teaches them social skills and the value of cooperation.
‘We look at the coherent development of the child – academically, socially and emotionally. Maths and science are important, but so are empathy, understanding how to be a good friend and knowing how to work with others,’ Louise explains.
‘The kids are shown pictures with different facial expressions on them, and we talk about the different emotions that people feel and why they may feel that way. This is also useful when we read stories. I find that good fiction enables the kids to get inside the head of the characters, to put them in the shoes of somebody else. I think good books can help; the children become more empathetic.’
Louise’s view is supported by research from the New School for Social Research in New York. The results of five experiments involving more than a thousand participants showed that reading literary fiction improves our ability to detect and understand other people’s emotions. But it can’t just be any sort of fiction.
The researchers distinguished between ‘popular fiction’ (where the author leads you by the hand as a reader) and ‘literary fiction’ (in which you must find your own way and fill in the gaps). Instead of being told why a certain character behaves as they do, you have to figure it out yourself. That way, the book becomes not just a simulation of a social experience, it is a social experience.
There is also evidence to support the notion that teaching empathy reduces bullying. In 2015, a study asked how many boys between the ages of eleven and fifteen had felt bullied within the previous month, and 6 per cent of Danish boys reported that they had. In the UK, 50 per cent more reported having been bullied (9 per cent), and almost twice as many felt bullied in the US (11 per cent). Austria reported the most bullying (21 per cent) and the Swedish the least (4 per cent), according to the OECD report ‘Skills for Social Progress: The Power of Social and Emotional Skills’.