By Chua Jun Yan (13A01A)

In his memoirs, Lee Kuan Yew describes a feature of Britain he admired during his days in Cambridge: newspaper vendors would place their publications in public and leave them alone, trusting that people would be honest enough to pay.  Can such a scheme work out in Raffles—the school which touts integrity as one of its core values? That was what this correspondent set out to explore.

The premise of the social experiment was simple: over one afternoon, 15 cups of bubble tea were left on a table at the S. Rajaratnam Block foyer, where both Year 1–4 and Year 5–6 students regularly passed by. Accompanying the cups of bubble tea was an empty money box, together with a sign that read: “Place $1.20 into the box and help yourself”. Ostensibly, the success of this “honest system” was entirely contingent on the honour and trustworthiness of students. Nonetheless, covert observers were planted in the vicinity to monitor the progress of the experiment.

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