How we are MORE likely to hand in a lost wallet if it is stuffed with cash: Study finds more people returned a lost purse containing $95 dollars than one holding just $13
- Finding refutes traditional economic assumptions based around financial gain
- Researchers found maintaining the self-image of being honest is more valuable
- Altruistic concerns play a secondary role in deciding whether to return a wallet
- 17,000 ‘lost’ wallets were given to receptions in 355 cities to see which returned
People are more likely to try to return a lost wallet to its owner if it is full of cash, rather than pocketing it for themselves, a global experiment has revealed.
If you find a wallet and decide to keep it, your self-image of being an honest person has to change — and this psychological cost can outweigh the value of the wallet.
Experts handed in over 17,000 ‘lost’ wallets to the receptions of various public and private institutions worldwide to explore the factors that made people return them.
The findings contradict both the economic and popular assumptions that the financial gain would encourage people to keep the wallet rather than return it.
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People are more likely to try to return a lost wallet to its owner if it is full of cash, rather than pocketing it for themselves, a global experiment has revealed (stock image)
DO YOU LIVE IN AN ‘HONEST’ COUNTRY?
The proportion of wallets returned to the researchers varied considerably between countries.
In Scandinavia, Switzerland and the Netherlands, between 70–85 per cent of the wallets were returned.
When it came to those that contained keys but no money, the Swiss were more likely to return the wallet.
Danes, Swedes and Kiwis were found to notably be even more honest when the apparently lost wallets contained larger sums of money.
However, in countries including China, Kazakhstan, Kenya and Peru, only 8–20 per cent of the wallets were returned.
Nevertheless, the trend in which wallets containing more money or more valuable contents were more likely to be returned could be found in all bar two of the 40 countries studied, the exceptions being Mexico and Peru.
Pretending to have lost them, researchers from the Universities of Michigan, Utah and Zurich handed in over 17,000 wallets to the receptions of various institutions — including banks, hotels and police stations — in 355 cities across 40 countries.
Four factors that could influence a decision on whether to return a lost wallet to its owner were examined.
These included the financial incentive to keep the found money, the effort needed to contact the owner, concern for the welfare of the owner and what the team dub the ‘psychological costs of dishonest behaviour.
Researchers were expecting to find a value above which people tended to keep the money they had found, but instead discovered that in 38 of the 40 countries studied people were more likely to return a wallet the more cash it contained.
On average, 51 per cent of those people handed wallets with a small amount of money tried to return it, a figure that rose to 72 per cent when the wallet contained a larger sum.
‘It’s natural to assume that this is simply because people are altruistic and because they care about the owner of the wallet,’ said paper author and economist Christian Zünd of the University of Zurich.
‘However, there’s a lot of research that suggests that even though people care about others, they still tend to care more about themselves,’ he added.
‘The psychological forces — an aversion to not viewing oneself as a thief — can be stronger than the financial ones,’ explained paper author and economist Michel André Maréchal, also of the University of Zurich.
‘Keeping a found wallet means having to adapt one’s self-image, which comes with psychological costs,’ he added.
In an addition survey, participants reported that the more money they found in lost wallet, the more likely they were to regard not returning it as theft — thereby increasing the psychological cost of such behaviour.
The wallets the researchers handed in typically contained a shopping list, a business card, a key and either the equivalent of $13.45 (£10.60), $94.15 (£74.18), or no money at all.
A key is an item which in theory only has value to its owner, rather than the finder — so by not including a key in some wallets, the team could explore the extent to which altruistic concerns played a role in the decision as to whether to return the wallet.
Researchers found that a wallet with money and a key was more likely to be returned than a wallet with the same amount of money but no key.
Given this, concern for the welfare of the wallet’s owner likely play a significant but secondary role in considerations over returning the lost item.
The findings contradict classical economic models, which predict that not only will people typically keep a lost wallet, but are more likely to do so if there is a larger amount of money at stake because such creates a financial incentive.
Economists are not the only people to be under this misapprehension, the researchers showed, with the 64 per cent of the general public also believing that lost wallets containing large sums of money are more likely to be kept by the finder.
‘We mistakenly assume that our fellow human beings are selfish,’ said paper author Alain Cohn, an economist at the University of Michigan.
‘In reality, their self-image as an honest person is more important to them than a short-term monetary gain.’
The full findings of the study were published in the journal Science.
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