How Honest Are We Really?

As part of a two-year research experiment, researchers handed in more than 17,000 ‘lost’ wallets that they said they had found in public buildings in 355 cities in 40 countries around the world to find out how honest people were. The researchers, along with 279 academic economists, assumed that putting money in the wallets would make people less likely to return them. However, the results were not as expected.

All the wallets used in the experiment contained a few business cards with the contact information, a grocery list in the local language, and a key. Some contained about $13 in local currency and some had no money at all. They were handed in at police stations, hotels, post offices and theatres. The research assistants then waited to be contacted. When the results came in, they found that in all but two of the 40 countries (Peru and Mexico) people were more likely to report the wallets with money than those without.

There was a lot of variation in outcomes depending on the country. In India, 314 men and 86 women in eight different cities were involved in the experiment. An impressive 43% of the wallets containing money were reported to their owners, yet only 22% of the wallets without cash were returned. For wallets with money, the highest rate of reporting was in Denmark (82%) and the lowest in Peru (13%). Switzerland (73%) had the highest reporting rate of wallets without money while China had the lowest (7%).

The researchers also did a ‘big money’ test with wallets containing about $100 in the US, the UK and Poland to see if this would affect results. They found that 72% of the wallets with the larger sum of money were returned. So what is the reason for all of this honesty?

The researchers suggested first of all that it was just basic altruism – people care about other people’s feelings. This idea seemed evident as when they did a similar test with cashless wallets that only contained a key – something of value only to the owner – those wallets were about 10% more likely to be reported than those with no key. Nevertheless, empathy toward strangers doesn’t explain everything. The researchers believe that their findings also have a lot to do with how people percieve themselves.

Alain Cohn, the study’s lead author, said that, when asked, people said that if there’s cash in the wallet, it feels more like stealing. “When people stand to heavily profit from engaging in dishonest behaviour, the desire to cheat increases, but so do the psychological costs of viewing oneself as a thief – and sometimes the latter will dominate the former” the authors of the study wrote

Dan Ariely, a university economist and author of the book ‘The Honest Truth About Dishonesty’, says that the study shows that material benefits do not always drive people’s decisions about whether to be honest. According to Ariely, “our decisions about dishonesty are not about a rational cost-benefit analysis but about what we feel comfortable with from a social norm perspective”.

Another factor in the experiment was how honest a country’s public institutions are. Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index ranks nations according to perceived levels of public sector corruption and according to Christian Lukas Zünd, one of the lead authors of the study, “Wallet reporting rates in our experiment do correlate with measures like the Transparency International index”. 

Ultimately, for the participants, it seems that honesty does pay. Most of the people who reported the wallets with money were allow to keep the cash.