Researchers Placed 17,000 Wallets in Different Cities to See How Many People Would Return Them

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The idea is quite simple. 11 men and 2 women have traveled to 355 major cities across 40 countries where they “lost” 17,000 wallets. The main goal was to see how differently citizens in each country responded to a lost wallet. {snip}

There were two types of wallets used in the experiment, one had a key and no money inside, another one had some money and a key

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The average amount of money in the wallet was $13.45 (USD) in the country’s currency, and a few countries (United Kingdom, Poland, and the United States) had a larger sum of $94.15. {snip}

Here’s the graph portraying how different countries responded to this experiment

{snip} Scandinavian countries aced the experiment by returning the biggest amount of lost wallets. Unfortunately, countries like China, Morocco, Peru, and Kazakhstan had the smallest return-rate.

There were a few factors that affected the way people responded to the lost wallet — researchers found that wallets that had a key were returned way more often than those without the key, which mainly has to do with people thinking the key has a more significant value to the owner.

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