Picture a stranger walking up to the counter of a bank, a post office or a hotel, handing over a wallet they say they found on the street, and leaving in a hurry. Inside is a contact email for the owner and, sometimes, cash. The person behind the counter now has a choice nobody will ever check. What most of them chose is one of the most striking findings in the science of honesty.
The experiment
Economists Alain Cohn, Michel André Maréchal, David Tannenbaum and Christian Lukas Zünd ran that scene again and again. In their 2019 Science paper, "Civic honesty around the globe," they describe turning in "more than 17,000 lost wallets containing varying amounts of money" at public and private institutions in 355 cities across 40 countries. Then they measured one thing: whether the person who took the wallet emailed the owner to return it.
Standard economic intuition says cash should be a temptation. The more money in a wallet, the more reason to pocket it and stay quiet. The researchers found the opposite. In the paper's words: "In virtually all countries, citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money."
The spread between countries was wide. Summarizing the study, a 2022 paper in Frontiers in Psychology noted that wallets with money were reported most often in Sweden (82%), Denmark (82%), Norway (80%) and Switzerland (80%), and least often in Mexico (16%) and Peru (14%). And in follow-up coverage, CBS News reported that "more than 70% of lost wallets were returned if they had large amounts of money inside."
Nobody predicted it
Perhaps the best part: the authors asked people to guess the result beforehand. According to the paper, "neither nonexperts nor professional economists were able to predict this result." Most of us, it turns out, are more cynical about strangers than strangers deserve.
Why would more money make people more honest? The authors' data point to two forces working together: "altruistic concerns and an aversion to viewing oneself as a thief," both of which grow as the amount at stake rises. Keeping a wallet with nothing in it feels like nothing. Keeping one with cash in it feels like stealing, and most people don't want to be that person, even when no one would ever know.
The honest caveats
Good studies invite good arguments, and this one got several. The study counted only one behavior: whether the recipient emailed the owner. Researchers in China argued that misses a lot. In a 2023 PNAS replication in China, Yang and colleagues found email response rates similar to the original study, but when they went back to collect the wallets, 77.8% were safely kept for the owner. Their explanation is that in more collectivist cultures, safekeeping may be the expected norm. Cohn's team replied that the collectivism finding did not hold up to reanalysis.
A 2025 Scientific Reports study added a simpler point: many people in China rarely use email. In the original study, it notes, the reporting rate for a wallet without money in China was 7%. When finders were helped to reach the owner on WeChat instead, 59.3% reported the wallet, though the authors caution that the designs differ too much for a direct comparison.
So country rankings deserve a grain of salt. The headline finding, that more money in the wallet brought more honesty almost everywhere, is the part that has stood up. For more on why people do the decent thing, see our guide to the science of giving.
Today's act
The act: Be the person in the study who sends the email. Return something to its rightful owner today.
- Give back something you borrowed and forgot about: a book, a dish, a tool.
- If a cashier hands you too much change, or a bill leaves something off, say so.
- Find something lost? Go one step past handing it in. Look for a name, email or phone number and reach out yourself.
- Make it easy for honest finders: put a contact email in your wallet and an "if found" note on your phone's lock screen.
Sources
- Science — Cohn, Maréchal, Tannenbaum & Zünd, Civic honesty around the globe (2019)
- Frontiers in Psychology — Gavreliuc et al., To steal or not to steal (2022)
- CBS News — Lost wallet experiment with hidden cameras (Dec. 2020)
- PNAS — Yang et al., Unraveling controversies over civic honesty measurement: An extended field replication in China (2023)
- PNAS — Tannenbaum, Maréchal & Cohn, A closer look at civic honesty in collectivist cultures (2023)
- Scientific Reports — Hung et al., Randomized studies in China show that studying and promoting civic honesty needs to consider local norms (2025)