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NPR https://www.npr.org/2019/06/20/734141432/what-dropping-17-000-wallets-around-the-globe-can-teach-us-about-honesty [npr.org] reports on some unconventional research, wallets were dropped around the world with different amounts of money in them and the researchers kept track of how many were returned.

I'll save you the suspense, wallets with more money (up to $100 was tested) were more likely to be returned! Including a key in the wallet roughly increased the rate of return by 10%.

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.

Full text of the paper is at https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/06/19/science.aau8712 [sciencemag.org] It starts out with:

Honest behavior is a central feature of economic and social life (1, 2). Without honesty, promises are broken, contracts go unenforced, taxes remain unpaid, and governments become corrupt.

Original Submission