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 in others, we can help create an honest society we can all rely on.