Are developed countries more honest than the developing countries ?

Its assumed by most people on bot sides, the developed and the developing that normal people are more honest in the advanced countries. The question is how true is this ?

The rationale used is that in all of these countries, everyone honestly purchases tickets on public transport, don’t break traffic laws, and so on.  They don’t litter, pedestrians wait for the lights to change and all in all are much more disciplined.

I agreed with the fact that all of this was true and visibly so, in all developed countries, such as in US, Canada, Singapore, Europe and several others. The part I was not sure about was the honesty or more disciplined bit. How could human beings in 1 part of the world be so different from another part. Could it be genetic ?

So I decided to check out in whatever small way I could whether this could be validated 1 way or another. Since the US and Singapore were 2 places I visited frequently, I decided to use these to check out the perception. And I came across a few very interesting facts.

In the US, all travel is 100% checked and monitored. What this means is that you pay and enter, or a ticket inspector will check the ticket of each person. Hence the question of honesty or dishonesty does not arise. In India, the commuter has a choice. Since limited checking is done, a person could travel and take a chance at not being caught. Law of averages, some will get caught, sometimes.

The 2nd check was traffic violations. Yet another interesting fact got thrown up. The fines and associated point system were extremely expensive. An average of $ 150 which is more than 3% of the earnings of an average driver. And additional impact of having points docked, additional insurance premium and even having to do social service. In India, its Rs. 100, which is less than 0.4% of the earnings of an average driver. And no additional impact. Also the number of police and associated technology used to regulate offenders is huge. Once again, a question of not being able to break the law.

And finally, lets evaluate littering and discipline. The fines for littering are huge. $1000 and enforced. In Singapore, which is got an extremely strict disciplinary government, they were unable to stop gum from being thrown everywhere. So much so, that gum is banned in the country. So once again it seems like the system has been designed to encourage compliance and severely penalize non compliance.

Based on all of this, ts my belief that people have similar attitudes and behavior across. However what differentiates their behavior as socially friendly and positive or socially negative is based on the system design, and of course implementation.

In other words if we would like to see India as honest, clean and disciplined all we need to do is make it unaffordable to be non-compliant. And hopefully, this will happen in the very near future.