Researchers “Left” 17,000 Wallets In Different Places Around The World To Check How Many People Would Return Them
Tags: opinion
A kind deed is like a boomerang – it always comes back. When you help someone in need, be it with a punctured tyre, or a few coins to make an important call, all it would result in you being helped when you need it the most. But, it doesn’t always happen as planned. You can’t decide when it is going to happen. All you can do is keep doing good.
But how does one test the honesty of people? By ‘losing’ a wallet, of course!
Researchers at Science Journal spent around a million just by researching this, but the results are worth the money. The idea is pretty simple- 11 men and a couple of women in around 355 cities of the world will be losing 17000 wallets.
Read: People Who Constantly Point Out Grammatical Mistakes Are Jerks, Study Suggests
Some of the wallets contained some grocery list in the country’s national language, a couple of business cards belonging to the owner, while others contain a key and cash. The average money in the wallet was $13.45 in that country’s currency denomination. But some countries, like the US, UK, Poland and others were given a much larger sum of $94.15.
Interestingly, some wallets didn’t contain money, but a key.
The results were quite shocking. The graph below shows the yellow dots as wallets returned without money and red dots as wallets with money. And like most other attributes of human values and sentiments, Nordic countries aced up the experiment returning the highest number of wallets both with money and without. On the other hand, countries like Peru, Kazakhstan and China had the least number of wallets returned.
There are obviously a large number of factors at work and so, no generalisation should be applied. Wallets without money were returned mostly because people probably thought that the key had some sentimental value to the owner.
Of course people on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter was quite ready to take sides, while the rest tried to give explanations for their country’s standing on the scale.
One thing can’t be denied though- Scandinavia is really the place to be if one wants to lead a happy and safe life.
Also read:
Researchers ‘Lost’ 17,000 Wallets in Hundreds of Cities to See What People Would Actually Return
IMAGE CREDIT: Galina Peshkova
Written by: Mayukh Saha
Hey! I am Mayukh. I help people and websites with content, videos, design, and social media management. I am an avid traveler and I started living as a digital nomad in Europe since 2019. I am currently working on www.noetbook.com - a creative media company. You can reach out to me anytime: justmayukh@gmail.
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