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What Dropping 17,000 Wallets Around The Globe Can Teach Us About Honesty

Merrit Kennedy

Researchers dropped more than 17,000 wallets with varying amounts of money in countries around the world. Here, an example of the wallets that held the most money. Christian Zünd hide caption

Researchers dropped more than 17,000 wallets with varying amounts of money in countries around the world. Here, an example of the wallets that held the most money.

So picture this: You're a receptionist at, say, a hotel. Someone walks in and says they found a lost wallet but they're in a hurry. They hand it to you. What would you do?

And would that answer be different if it was empty or full of cash?

Those are questions researchers have been exploring; Thursday, they published their findings in the journal Science .

The experiment started small, with a research assistant in Finland turning in a few wallets with different amounts of money. He would walk up to the counter of a big public place, like a bank or a post office.

"Acting as a tourist, he mentioned that he found the wallet outside around the corner, and then he asked the employees to take care of it," says Alain Cohn from the University of Michigan, the study's lead author.

The researchers assumed that putting money in the wallet would make people less likely to return it, because the payoff would be bigger. A poll of 279 "top-performing academic economists" agreed.

But researchers saw the opposite.

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"People were more likely to return a wallet when it contained a higher amount of money," Cohn says. "At first we almost couldn't believe it and told him to triple the amount of money in the wallet. But yet again we found the same puzzling finding."

The researchers decided to do the experiment on a much larger scale. They put together a team that dropped off more than 17,000 "lost" wallets in 40 countries over the course of more than two years.

All the wallets were about the same — a small clear case holding a few business cards, a grocery list in the local language, and a key. Some contained no money and some held the equivalent of about $13. Research assistants turned them in at the kinds of places people would typically bring a wallet they found on the ground — police stations, hotels, post offices and theaters.

Such a large operation came with a few headaches, Cohn says. One of the researchers was detained in Kenya for suspicious behavior. And researchers worried that a backpack full of wallets might raise eyebrows when crossing borders.

It's also worth noting that for logistical reasons, most of the wallets were not literally returned to the researchers. After people reported a wallet to its supposed owner over email, they were told that the owner had left town and didn't need the wallet anymore.

As results rolled in from around the world, the researchers kept finding the same result. In 38 out of 40 countries, people were more likely to report receiving wallets with money than those without. And in the other two, the decrease in reporting rates for the wallets with money were not statistically significant.

What if the wallets contained far more money? The researchers did a "big money" test in the U.S., the U.K. and Poland. In that phase of the experiment, the staff dropped wallets containing nearly $100, instead of $13.

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Cohn says the results there were even more dramatic. "The highest reporting rate was found in the condition where the wallet included $100," he says. Forty-six percent of wallets with no money were reported, compared with 61% of those with about $13 and 72% of those with nearly $100.

What's behind all this honesty? The researchers suggest two explanations.

First, just basic altruism — the person who reports receiving a lost wallet might care about the feelings of the stranger who lost it.

There's some evidence for that. The same team ran a test where some wallets contained only a key — a thing valuable only to the person who lost it. Those wallets were about 10% more likely to be reported than those with no key.

Caring about strangers doesn't explain everything, though. The researchers think their findings also have a lot to do with how people see themselves — and most people don't want to see themselves as a thief. Cohn says they polled people who said that if there's cash in the wallet, it just feels more like stealing.

And, he says, "the more money wallet contains, the more people say that it would feel like stealing if they do not return the wallet."

Duke University economist Dan Ariely , who studies dishonesty, says this shows material benefits do not necessarily drive people's decisions about whether to be honest.

The study "shows in a very natural, experimental way our decisions about dishonesty are not about a rational cost-benefit analysis but about what we feel comfortable with from a social norm perspective and how much we can rationalize our decisions," Ariely says.

The rates at which people tried to return the wallets varied a lot by country, even though the presence of money in the wallet almost always increased the chances. In Denmark, for example, researchers saw more than 80% of wallets with money reported. Peru saw a little over 10%.

The researchers think wealth could be a factor, but there's a lot more research needed to explain the differences. "Now the problem is that we don't really know whether wealth affects honesty or it's the other way around" — whether honesty contributes to a country's relative wealth, says Cohn.

Countries with higher rates of primary education were also more likely to see high rates of lost wallets being reported.

"What this suggests is that what you learn in school is not just math and reading but also social skills, or just more generally how you treat each other," Cohn adds.

The study's results could help policymakers and businesses that want to figure out what motivates people to act for the good of others, rather than for their own enrichment.

"What our study suggests is that there might be a potential to promote honest behavior, first, by making the harm that your behavior can impose on other people more salient," Cohn says.

Cohn says the results also suggest that to promote honest behavior, businesses or policymakers should make it more difficult for people to deceive themselves that they're being honest when they are actually doing the opposite. For example, by having people sign a statement promising truthfulness before they report their car mileage, rather than after.

And sometimes, honesty does pay. Almost all of the people who reported a lost wallet got to keep the cash.

Experiment with ‘lost’ wallets reveals that people are surprisingly honest

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They say honesty is the best policy — and now there’s scientific evidence to prove it.

An unconventional study that offered volunteers the chance to pocket nearly $100 found that the more people stood to gain by hiding the truth, the more likely they were to come clean.

The results, published Thursday in the journal Science, offer surprising insights into the ways that money influences honesty.

The findings could help shape policies that encourage conscientious behavior in a range of situations, researchers said. The Internal Revenue Service could design its forms in a way that discourages people from cheating on their taxes, for example, while insurance companies could change the way they collect information about a car accident so that lying becomes less appealing.

“Honesty is essential for almost all social and economic relations,” said Michel Maréchal , an economics professor at the University of Zurich who helped lead the study.

Scientists have studied how the temptation of money affects honesty in laboratory settings, but little is known about how they’re related in the real world — especially on a global scale.

So a team of economists devised an experiment involving more than 170,000 “lost” wallets that turned up in 335 cities across 40 countries, from Indonesia to Ghana to Brazil.

Each wallet contained a grocery list, a key, and three business cards with the same male name and email address. Some of them had no money, while others had the equivalent of about $13.50.

To kick off the experiment, a research assistant brought a wallet to the front desk of a hotel, bank, post office or other public place. He or she would claim to have found it on outside and push it toward the person behind the desk.

“Somebody must have lost it,” the research assistant would tell the unwitting employee. “I’m in a hurry and have to go. Can you please take care of it?”

The study authors hypothesized that employees would be more likely to email the wallet’s “owner” (using the address on the business card) if it contained no cash. After all, economists assume people will behave rationally and maximize their utility — which in this case would mean keeping the $13.50 windfall.

But that’s not what happened.

“Much to our surprise, we observed the opposite effect,” Maréchal said. “People were more likely to return the wallet when it contained a higher amount of money.”

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In the experiment, 51% of wallets with cash were returned, compared with 40% of those without bills or coins.

And people were not treating themselves to a finder’s fee. Spot checks of the wallets showed that 98% of the money was turned in.

“When there was something missing, it was coins,” said study leader Alain Cohn , a behavioral economist at the University of Michigan. In those cases, he said, the researchers figured the coins simply “fell out of the wallet.”

Perhaps $13.50 was such a pittance “that people simply wouldn’t bother stealing it,” said co-author Christian Zünd , a graduate student at the University of Zurich. So the researchers expanded their experiment to include wallets with the equivalent of about $94.

The extra cash seemed to induce yet more honesty. Wallets with the big bucks were returned 72% of the time, compared with 61% of the wallets with less money and 46% of wallets with no cash. Once again, the economists were stumped.

“Why are people more likely to return a wallet that contains more rather than less money?” Zünd said.

Perhaps people were afraid of getting into legal trouble if they kept the money for themselves. The researchers checked to see if the return rates were higher when the wallet was dropped off in the presence of witnesses or security cameras, but those factors didn’t seem to make a difference. Nor was there a correlation between return rates and local lost-property laws.

If people weren’t acting out of fear or being influenced by peer pressure, maybe they were sincerely concerned about the well-being of the wallet’s “owner.” So the researchers introduced “lost” wallets that contained money but no key. The result: Employees were 9.2% more likely to return a wallet with a key than a wallet without one — a sign of altruism, the study authors said.

But that wouldn’t explain why wallets with $94 were returned at higher rates than wallets with $13.50. The researchers conducted a survey in the U.S., the United Kingdom and Poland (the three places where big-money wallets were “lost”) and asked people to rate how much they would feel like thieves if they kept a wallet, with or without money.

Keeping a wallet with no money in it did not feel like stealing, Zünd said. “With money, however, it suddenly feels like stealing, and it feels even more like stealing when the money in the wallet increases.”

In other words, the more money the ”lost” wallet contained, the greater the psychological cost of seeing oneself as a thief. That was a price people didn’t want to pay.

The results bolster the idea “that people care about maintaining a positive moral view of themselves,” said Nina Mažar , a Boston University behavioral economist who was not involved in the study.

Policymakers could use this insight to encourage better behavior among citizens “by making it more difficult for them to convince themselves that they are honest, when in fact, they did something wrong,” Cohn said.

Previous research has shown that reminding people about their moral standards just before they perform a specific task helps reduce their temptation to cheat. For example, people were more likely to fill out an insurance form honestly if they had to sign an honor statement at the beginning of the form rather than at the end.

Future studies should test whether these results would hold up if the owner of the “lost” wallet appeared to be a foreigner, according to Shaul Shavi , who studies behavioral ethics and economics at the University of Amsterdam.

“People find it worthwhile to act kindly toward members of their own group but not members of other groups,” he wrote in an essay that accompanies the study.

Mažar said she’d like to know more about how honest behavior varies across countries. In the experiment, for instance, the odds of a wallet with money being returned were more than three times higher in Switzerland than in China.

“We want to understand, ‘What are the commonalities, what are the differences?’” Mažar said. “Because if we understand those, maybe we’ll have a better sense of how we could increase civil honesty on a much larger scale or reduce corruption.”

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People Are Surprisingly Honest About Returning Lost Wallets

A large new study has found that unwitting subjects were more likely to report a lost wallet as the amount of money inside increased

Brigit Katz

Correspondent

If you were to lose your wallet in public, you might expect to never see it again, particularly if it contained a wad of cash. But this may be an ungenerous assumption about human nature, according to an expansive new study that found people are more likely to try and return lost wallets with money than those without. In fact, the more money a wallet held, the more likely the subjects were to seek out its owner, according to a new study published in the journal Science .

A team of researchers from the United States and Switzerland set out to discover how monetary incentives affect people’s inclination towards “acts of civic honesty, where people voluntarily refrain from opportunistic behavior.” The team’s fascinating experiment was conducted in 355 cities in 40 countries, and involved 17,303 wallets. Research assistants would take a wallet into one of several “societal institutions”—like a bank, theater, museum, post office, hotel, police station or court of law—and present it to an employee.

“Hi, I found this [wallet] on the street around the corner,” the assistant would say. “Somebody must have lost it. I’m in a hurry and have to go. Can you please take care of it?”

The wallets were in fact transparent business card cases, specifically selected so the unwitting subjects would be able to see the contents inside: three identical business cards, a grocery list and a key. Some of the wallets contained no money, and some held the equivalent of $13.45 USD. (Amounts were adjusted based on countries’ currencies and purchasing power.) The business cards and grocery list were written in the country’s local language. The cards displayed the name and email address of a fictitious male.

The researchers then waited to see if the subjects would reach out within 100 days of receiving the wallet. And they found that in an overwhelming majority of countries, the subjects were more likely to try and return the wallet if it had money in it. There was variation in reporting rates from place to place. In Switzerland, for instance, 74 percent of moneyless wallets were returned compared to 79 percent of wallets with money, according to the Associated Press . In China, those rates were seven percent versus 22 percent, and in the United States the figures were 39 percent versus 57 percent. But “[o]n average,”the study authors write, “adding money to the wallet increased the likelihood of reporting a wallet from 40 percent ... to 51 percent.”

Only two countries—Peru and Mexico—showed a decline in reporting rates when money was added to the wallets, but the results were not statistically significant, the researchers say.

Granted, $13.45 is not a particularly large amount of money. What would happen, the researchers wondered, if they increased the sum, thereby boosting the incentive for subjects to steal? In three countries—the United States, the United Kingdom and Poland—the team ran a secondary experiment, where they stuffed the equivalent of $94.15 USD into some of the wallets. And they found that reporting rates increased as the amount of money got larger. Across the three countries, 46 percent of people tried to return wallets with no money, 61 percent reached out about wallets with $13.45 and 72 percent tried to contact the owners of wallets containing $94.15.

Typically, the researchers replied to emails about the lost wallets with the following note: “I really appreciate your help. Unfortunately, I have already left town. The content of the business card holder and the key are not important to me. You can keep all of it or donate it to charity.” But in a subset of cases, the team actually collected the wallets; 98 percent of the original sums were returned.

The study authors looked at several factors that might influence the subjects’ decision to report and return a lost wallet—like the presence of security cameras, or state-level differences in lost property laws—but found that “none of these factors explain meaningful variation in reporting rates.” Alain Cohn, first study author and assistant professor of information at the University of Michigan, says that people instead seem to be driven by “the psychological cost of the dishonest act,” according to Pam Belluck of the New York Times .

“The evidence suggests that people tend to … have an aversion to seeing themselves as a thief,” Cohn explains.

In addition to such concerns about self-image, altruism seems to be a motivating factor driving the decision to return a wallet. In yet another subset of the experiment—conducted in the U.S., U.K. and Poland—the researchers turned in some wallets that did not have a key. The subjects were, on average, 9.2 percentage points more likely to reach out about a wallet with a key than without one. And because a key is an object valuable to the owner of the wallet, but not to the recipient, the study authors conclude that “recipients reported a lost wallet partly because recipients are concerned about the harm they impose on the owner.”

The new study raises a number of intriguing questions, like whether similar results would be reported among people who were not acting in an official capacity as employees, or among people who simply found a wallet on the street. But the research does suggest that we may hold an overly pessimistic view of human nature. In fact, in the final phases of the study, the researchers asked both economists and non-experts to predict reporting rates for wallets containing $0, $13.45, and $94.15. Neither group expected the rates to increase as the amount of money grew.

“[The research] shows that when we make a decision whether to be dishonest or not, it’s not only ‘What can I get out of it versus what’s the punishment, what’s the effort?’” Nina Mazar, a behavioral scientist at Boston University who was not involved in the study, tells Belluck of the Times . “It actually matters that people have morals and they like to think of themselves as good human beings.”

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Brigit Katz | | READ MORE

Brigit Katz is a freelance writer based in Toronto. Her work has appeared in a number of publications, including NYmag.com, Flavorwire and Tina Brown Media's Women in the World.

June 20, 2019

“Missing” Wallets with More Cash Are More Likely to Be Returned

A massive global study with 17,000 planted wallets found similar patterns among most of the 40 countries involved

By Lydia Denworth

Getty Images

You find a lost wallet. Do you return it? Do you think other people would return it? It is a bit of a hassle. And what if there’s a little money in the wallet? A lot of money? Who couldn’t use a little extra cash? These are the questions at the heart of the most extensive experiment in civic honesty to date, published on June 20 in Science . And the results are remarkable and encouraging.

Most of us would predict that the more money is at stake, the more likely individuals are to keep the wallet. Even economists who study incentives expect people to pocket the cash. But human beings deserve more credit than that. Over three years, a team of economists left more than 17,000 wallets containing varying amounts of money at civic institutions in 40 countries, then measured how many were reported to their owner. Rates of return varied greatly, from 14 percent in China to 76 percent in Switzerland. But strikingly, in 38 out of 40 countries, the more money a wallet contained, the more likely people were to return it. “People are a bit too pessimistic in their view of human behavior,” says economist Michel Maréchal of the University of Zurich, one of the lead authors of the study.

Even the researchers believed the opposite would be true. After exploring possible explanations for their finding in follow-up studies, they concluded that people everywhere were motivated by a combination of altruism and an aversion to viewing themselves as a thief.

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“This is an amazing study and an important contribution,” says economist Marie Claire Villeval of the French National Center for Scientific Research, who was not involved in the work. She found it especially striking that more money generated stronger moral dilemmas. “The psychological cost of not returning the wallet increases at the same time as the selfish temptation to keep the money for oneself,” she says. “Interestingly, this stronger moral dilemma is resolved by a more honest, or more civic, behavior.”

Wallet contents used in the study. Credit: Christian Zünd

The study is also notable for methodological reasons. “Most research studying human honesty is conducted using experimental tasks in the lab,” says behavioral scientist Shaul Shalvi of the University of Amsterdam, who was also not involved in the research and wrote an accompanying commentary on its significance in Science . “[This] study provides a measure of civic honesty with an actual behavior that you may encounter in the real world.”

The breadth and depth of the study is also impressive. “So many wallets!” Shalvi says. The fact that the result was replicated across such a large number of countries, cities and institutions is convincing. “We can try to understand why one or two countries showed a slightly different pattern than the rest,” Shalvi says, “but if you sample 40 countries, and in 38 out of 40, the same pattern emerges, that suggests a very clear, robust finding.”

The study began much less ambitiously. In 2013 Maréchal and Alain Cohn of the University of Michigan conducted a pilot study. They asked a student in Finland to pose as a tourist and drop off wallets at civic institutions. He said he had found each wallet and asked the staff to deal with it. When more money led to higher rates of return, Maréchal and Cohn did not believe it and told the student to triple the amount in the wallets. Nothing changed. “We thought, ‘Maybe there’s something special about Finland,’” Maréchal says. So he and Cohn set out to understand “whether this result is specific to particular cultures or whether it actually represents a more global phenomenon.”

In 355 cities, they used clear plastic wallets that revealed their contents. Each contained a key, a grocery list written in the local language, three business cards (using a name common to the country) and either no money or the local equivalent of $13.45 in U.S. dollars. The wallets were always turned in by study collaborators inside similar institutions (banks, hotels and so on) to control who participated and allow for generalized results. (The study cannot tell us what happens to wallets found by passersby on the street.) The result was nearly always the same: “On average, adding money to the wallet increased the likelihood that it would get reported from 40 percent to 51 percent,” says co-author Christian Zünd of the University of Zurich.

Because the finding was so surprising, Maréchal, Cohn, Zünd and their co-author David Tannenbaum of the University of Utah went to extraordinary lengths to verify it. They controlled for the age of the person receiving the wallet, access to computers and the presence of witnesses or security cameras. None affected the results. They substantially increased the money to a more tempting $94.14 in three countries. Reporting rates increased to 72 percent.

In surveys, the researchers described the experimental setup to American adults and asked what they thought would happen. Participants overwhelmingly believed that higher amounts of money would inspire more people to keep the cash. A survey of top economists generated more muted predictions, but they still anticipated a slight decrease in return rates as the monetary value went up.

“[People] place too much weight on self-interest and too little weight on psychological factors like self-image concerns,” Cohn says. The more money that was in a wallet, he and his colleagues found, the more said it felt like stealing not to report it.

Differences in rates of return in various countries correlated to other proxies of honesty, such as measures of public corruption and tax evasion. Yet the researchers feel strongly that the different rates of return are less interesting than the consistent finding that more money motivated more honesty. Only Mexico and Peru failed to demonstrate that pattern.

The importance of the factors at work here may vary from one context to another, Maréchal says, “but we believe that people, policy makers and politicians should be encouraged to adopt a broader view of human behavior.” The authors hope increasing awareness of the negative impact people’s behavior has on others might increase honesty—so might making it more difficult for people to persuade themselves that they are honest when they do something wrong. “Reduce the moral wiggle room,” Maréchal says.