Napkins

Thanks to one of my colleagues at the OU for telling the story of ‘What the Bagel Man Saw’ as part of our day school session. This is a great story by Steven Dubner and Steven Levitt and a useful study that is probably sufficiently empirical to use in A2 Psychology. It’s particularly pertinent to Crime (OCR module 2549) and The Environment (OCR module 2547).

In short, Paul Feldman, economist turned bagel man delivered bagels to offices of varying sizes over a number of years and collected payment for the bagels via an honesty box. He kept rigorous data and, being an economist, analysed the data for relationships and correlations.

The data reveals some interesting ‘facts’, not least of all that people are essentially honest (89% of the time on average). There are also some fluctuations in honesty rate related the state of the economy, the weather, ‘911′, the individual’s status in the company, the size of the company etc., all of which offer the opportunity for comparisons to other research that we cover as part of the A2 course. This is of course a godsend for those synoptic questions and provides some much needed insight into ‘white collar crime’.

The story is part of the book ‘Freakonomics’ (details below) and I am told it’s a very good read.

A PDF of ‘What the Bagel Man Saw’ is available here:
http://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~bmayes/pdf/Bagel%20Man.pdf.

Levitt, S.D. and Dubner, S.J. (2005) Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything William Morrow.