Researchers Dropped 17,000 Wallets To Test Human Honesty — And The Results Were Surprising
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Researchers traveled across the globe dropping “lost wallets” for a study — and found some encouraging results.
A group of behavioral scientists created what might be the ultimate test of honesty, leaving “lost wallets” filled with cash in public places.
The experiment involved the researchers “losing” 17,000 wallets in 355 cities and 40 countries to evaluate how honest people would be when it came to money. The results were quite surprising.
The large-scale experiment involved a tourist (a research assistant in disguise) walking into a bank or another public place to give someone there a lost wallet that they had “found.” The wallet would be full of business cards, a grocery list, and, of course, money.
The researchers started off small by leaving wallets in places like the post office or movie theater in Finland, before expanding their experiment globally. They also increased the amount of cash inside the wallets — some carried $13, while others carried $100. Many had no money in them at all.
The underlying theory behind the experiment was that putting money in the wallet would make people less likely to return it because they would be able to claim the money for themselves.
And surely if the wallet contained a higher amount of money, it would be even more likely that people would claim it, right? But to the researchers’ surprise, they found the opposite was true.
“People were more likely to return a wallet when it contained a higher amount of money,” said lead author Alain Cohn from the University of Michigan. “At first we almost couldn’t believe it and told [the research assistant] to triple the amount of money in the wallet. But yet again we found the same puzzling finding.”
Astonishingly, 72 percent of the wallets containing $100 were reported, compared to 61 percent of the wallets with $13. Yet, 46 percent of the wallets with no money in them were reported.
The results suggested that people’s honesty had more to do with how bad the act of dishonesty made them feel; they felt worse about stealing a wallet with $100 in it than one with $13.
Maybe people aren’t so bad after all.
