Would you pass the wallet test?
Picture this: you’re working
a slow shift in a hotel lobby
when someone hurriedly
approaches the front desk.
They found a lost wallet
around the corner,
but they’re in a rush
and don’t have time to follow up.
They ask if you can handle it
and then run off.
Looking at the wallet you see it contains
a key, a grocery list, about $13,
and three business cards
with a name and email
you assume belong to the wallet’s owner.
So, what do you do?
Between 2013 and 2016,
over 17,000 front-desk workers
around the globe
were faced with this choice,
becoming unwitting participants
in a massive study of honesty.
And the results surprised top economists
and the researchers
running the experiment.
But to understand what
these groups were expecting,
we need to spend a little time
defining honesty.
We typically think of honesty
in terms of actively telling the truth
in our interpersonal relationships.
But in fact, every healthy society relies
on a shared foundation of honesty.
Using public services,
making business transactions,
and deciding government policies
requires a baseline expectation of honesty
from our fellow citizens.
Because of this,
understanding what drives honesty
is a vital research subject
for economists, psychologists,
and sociologists.
Unfortunately, honesty can be difficult
to investigate
when people know they’re being watched.
So, researchers have come
up with clever ways to analyze
this behavior outside the lab.
And this global study by the universities
of Michigan, Utah, and Zurich
sought to answer an important question:
will people engage in opportunistic
behavior
when there’s little-to-no chance
of being caught?
In what became known
as the Lost Wallet Test,
13 research assistants traveled
to 355 cities in 40 different countries,
recreating the same scenario
in hotels, banks, public offices,
and various cultural establishments.
The clear wallets ensured participants
could see their contents,
half of which contained a key,
grocery list, and business cards,
while the other half also included
the equivalent of roughly 13 US dollars.
The researchers believed the money
would discourage honesty.
Specifically, they thought participants’
self-interest would overpower
two competing factors:
their altruistic desire
not to harm the wallet’s owner,
and their desire to maintain
a positive self-image.
Regarding self-image, we generally like
to think of ourselves as good and honest.
But studies have found people are often
able to let themselves off the hook
for stealing small amounts of money.
As for harming the wallet's owner,
the victim of their crime
would be abstract.
They'd never met this person, and since
the wallet had come from another location,
it seemed unlikely they ever would.
For these reasons, researchers expected
money-filled wallets
to be reported less often,
and the 279 economists they surveyed
agreed.
But to their surprise,
the study found the exact opposite.
While only 46% of cash-free wallets
were reported,
61% of cash wallets were called in.
This pattern held true across the globe,
regardless of the participants’ age,
gender,
or whether they were being
observed during the wallet drop-off.
And when researchers tried increasing
the temptation to be dishonest
with wallets containing nearly $100,
the results surprised them again.
People reported 72%
of these big money wallets.
There are a lot of theories
for why honesty goes up
as the wallet becomes more valuable.
The $100 wallet certainly
increases self-interest.
But in international follow-up surveys,
people reported that taking larger sums
of money felt more like theft,
making it harder to maintain
a positive self-image.
It’s also possible that when
the financial stakes are higher,
so is the perceived harm
to the wallet’s owner.
Others have suggested that our commitment
to honesty could be altered
in professional settings,
meaning participants might have acted
differently outside the office.
Still, this result suggests
that self-interest
might not be as powerful
as we often think.
Seeing yourself as an honest person
can motivate you to be an honest person.
And by modeling this behavior
and celebrating it and others,
we can help create an honest society
we can all rely on.
