ABSTRACT
We design a new field experiment to test pro-social behaviour: will a household return a letter that has been incorrectly addressed? On average, we find that half of all letters were returned. Return rates do not vary significantly according to the gender, race or ethnicity of the fictitious addressee. However, return rates are higher in more affluent neighbourhoods.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 The Lost Letter experiment has since been used to test attitudes towards creationism (Bridges et al. Citation2002), same-sex marriage (Waugh, Plake, and Rienzi Citation2000) and abortion (Kunz and Fernquist Citation1989). Other Lost Letter studies have used posting rates as a measure of altruism (Holland, Silva, and Mace Citation2012) and explored whether posting rates vary when participants know that they are part of a research project (Fessler Citation2009). The Lost Letter experiment has also been extended to lost postcards (Bridges et al. Citation1997), lost emails (Stern and Faber Citation1997) and lost wallets (Helliwell and Wang Citation2011; Dolan, Laffan, and Kudrna Citation2015).
2 As an anonymous referee pointed out, we did not pre-specify our analysis, so it could be argued that we are guilty of p-hacking or inadvertently walking ‘the garden of forking paths’ (Gelman and Loken Citation2013). In our defence, we note that we chose these two independent variables (income and charitable donations) on the basis that we regard them as the best zipcode-level proxies for socio-economic status and social capital, respectively.
3 Our results are substantively unaffected by adding zipcode-level controls for the share of people who were born overseas and the share of people who moved into the neighbourhood within the previous five years.
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