... but I don't see anybody else saying that *they* actually thought of it before this guy did as a means of solving the problem of China's air pollution.

A lot of ideas are obvious once somebody announces what the idea actually is. Honestly, I think that people who would criticize the inventor simply because of the idea's apparent simplicity or obviousness are being rather snobbish, if you ask me.

But hey.... some might find it comforting to think that such values, which might otherwise seem outdated in today's word, are still alive and thriving in our society.

But thanks for showing it.

Study was done on 259 Germans. Out of which "90 subjects reported having an East German family background and 98 subjects having a West German family background."

Too small a sample size to be of any use? Indeed. They are way out in the "our numbers mean diddly-squat" territory, as their margins of error are 7.82% (WGFB) and 8.36% (EGFB). http://www.raosoft.com/samples...

I.e. when they report 9% and 19% average cheating that's actually 9 +/- 7.82% and 19 +/- 8.36%. It could just as well be that WGFB are cheating 16% of the time while EGFB are cheating only 11% of the time. Oh damn! Now it means that "because democracy, stupid", levels of interpersonal trust are lowered in the west.

Also... They all rolled the dice only 40 times. A fair dice should give an average mean of 3.5. They report average mean for "East German family background" (90 people) to be 3.83. For "West German family background" (98 people) they report an average mean of 3.68. But when you sample those same Germans whether they CONSIDER THEMSELVES East, West or just Germans - simply Germans (141 people) have an average mean of 3.70 while East/West Germans (73 people) have an average of 3.83.

Note how, smaller the sample the more extreme the result gets? That's because the overall sample size is too small. A couple of people misreporting the results could be throwing the whole thing off. AND they have a really strange sample of "German family heritage" (37 people), whatever that should mean as East-West was set as a 0-1 choice, who are practically not cheating at all, giving the average of 3.57. While "others" (i.e. immigrants) cheat the most. 3.85. And yes, they are the smallest sample of only 30 people.

On the other hand... the incentive to cheat was simply not there. At best, rolling a 6 all the time (i.e. cheating 100%), they'd get 6 Euros in the end. A cup of coffee costs about 4.2 Euros. So people were supposedly cheating in order to get between 0.07 and 0.35 Euros?

After agreeing to participate, each subject received an envelope with six single 1 EUR coins, the maximal possible payout on the die task we used to measure cheating. Subjects were then asked to throw a physical die 40 times.

... The payout that subjects ultimately received was determined by selecting one of their rolls at random, by having the experimenter draw a number from 1 to 40 out of an envelope. Subjects earned 1 EUR for each dot on this particular roll. If subjects were completely honest, they would be expected to report deciding on the high side of the die in 50 percent of cases, and the expected value of the average payout would be 3.50 EUR.

But there was plenty room for false positives as they used physical dice they ASSUMED were fair. When IRL a dice shorter by 3% on one side gives 6% more results on that side. And low quality, toy store bought, dice are even worse.

Also, East-West bias can be noted in the stats measured and stats assumed. No regression calculation was reported for West German family, while t-test values were always fixed (i.e. assumed) for East Germans and always calculated for West Germans. And there's that thing of "East German family background" being marked with a 0 and "West German family background" being marked with a 1. Someone seems to like West Germans better.