In 2015, a Swiss graduate student departed from the Zurich airport with a suitcase filled with empty wallets, loads of cash and 400 spare keys. It was for a science experiment, he explained.
He was part of a team of behavioral researchers tackling two important questions: Do people around the world return lost wallets? And does the amount of cash in a wallet make a difference?
Members of the team traveled to 355 cities in 40 countries with suspicious baggage that totaled more than 17,000 wallets.
Staff of institutions such as banks and police stations unknowingly became part of a global experiment of civic honesty when they were presented with wallets that supposedly had been lost.
Regardless of country, people were more likely to try to return wallets with larger amounts of money inside, according to a new study published Thursday in Science. This butts against long-standing economic models that predict people are more likely to be dishonest when the potential pay out is larger.
The study shows people overwhelmingly see themselves as good people and seek to maintain that image, even if it overrides the impulse to get ahead, said psychologist Nina Mazar of Boston University, who has studied honesty in lab conditions.
For each experiment, a European tourist walked into a bank or another institution with a wallet containing a shopping list, a key and a few duplicate business cards written in the local language. The tourist hands the wallet to a bank teller and, before quickly exiting, says: “I found this on the street near the entrance. Someone must have lost it. Can you take care of it?”
In some cases the teller would discover that the wallet contained no money. In other cases there was $15 in local currency. The tourists in these experiments, of course, were research assistants.
The fact that people were more likely to return wallets that included money surprised researchers. It also surprised the 300 top academic economists they surveyed, who predicted the opposite.
