Jon White writes about the sociology of tipping in NewScientist (19 December 2015, paywall) and has a surprising fact:
There are also worrying similarities between tipping and bribery. In a comparison of 32 countries, Magnus Torfason at the University of Iceland found that countries where tipping was most prevalent also tended to have more corruption. “My intuition is that if you don’t have tipping, you don’t have a population that is experienced in informal exchange. That makes bribery difficult,” he says. His native Iceland is a case in point, with little tipping and a strong cultural bias for transactions to be very transparent.
But I’m not sure I’d equate “informal exchange” with bribery; they seem to be rather different. (I’m also a trifle suspicious of such a small sample size, and wonder about cherry-picking – but that’s not really a worthy thought, hopefully the journal publishing these studies had good reviewers who looked at basic questions like these.)
From the same article comes this:
Tipping divides economists too. Why would you pay more for something when you don’t have to? That’s irrational. Even if a tip is designed to encourage good service, surely the most logical time for cash to change hands is up front. Paying extra after the event makes little sense, especially if you’re a one-time customer in a restaurant or a passenger in a cab whose driver you will probably never see again. What’s going on?
I’ve run across similar statements from and about economists, which has puzzled me a little bit. In particular, I remember a reference to some classic experiment in which someone is given some money and told they can give some other person any amount that they wish, and keep the rest. The expected behavior is to give the minimum and keep the rest, yet this does not typically occur; instead, an average of about 25% is given. Or something like: I cannot remember exactly, nor have I been able to find my reference, or any other good, dependable description. To me, it seems like these surprised economists (a visual out of FAMILY GUY) should consult with anthropologists – or evolutionary psychologists. In any case, economists think we’re just calculating machines…
Wondering about world wide corruption? Here’s Transparency International. Juicy fact: Afghanistan, ranked 172nd/175, has a score of -1.620813904. Perhaps a little rounding is in order.
