How honest are we?

You lost your wallet. Inside you have e-mail business card. How much is it possible to get a message saying they found him? If there was money in the wallet, do you raise it or lower the chance that you get it back, completely intact?

Asking such questions also implies asking what extent most people are basically honest or that they are meant to foreigners. Some evolutionary psychologists argue that altruism is limited to our relatives and to those who can return the goods we receive. Isn't that very cynical? Last month, researchers from the United States and Switzerland shed some light on that question when they published the results of a large and genius study involving more than 17 thousand lost wallets in 40 different countries.

In banks, theaters, museums, hotels, and public offices in 355 different cities, researchers' assistants left a wallet telling the person who found him on the street, but that they were in a hurry. The assistants asked the “to handle it” and left it without obtaining contact details or asking for any confirmation.

All the wallets were made from a transparent plastic, and three identical business cards and an e-mail address appeared immediately. The wallet also contained a shopping list in the store, written with a local language. Some wallets were owned by $13.45, or that amount of money in local currency, while others were limited to the US, United Kingdom and Poland contained 94.15 or its equivalent. Most wallets also had a key. Researchers recorded the number of messages reporting that they had found in their email address or business cards. To enable researchers to study reporting factors, each wallet contained e-mail addresses different from each other.

As one can expect, the rate of reporting tends to be higher in the richest countries. Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden were at the top of the list, with more than 64 percent of the presched owners contacted about those wallets. Poland and the Czech Republic were right behind us, leaving behind wealthier countries like Australia, Canada and the United States.

Some people believe that people of religion are more likely to obey moral rules than unbelievers, but the study did not support that view. In Sweden, Denmark and the Czech Republic, at least 75% of the population says that religion is not important to them, yet these countries are at the top for the highest reporting of lost wallets. On the other hand, more than 80% of the population in Peru and Morocco say religion is very important for them, but the scale of wallet reporting came down 25%.

As for the gender side, it turned out that women reported the missing wallet 2% more than men. This study supports earlier information suggesting that women tended to be more ethical than men.

The most unexpected result, however, was the one who showed that cash wallets were more likely to be reported to prefigured owners than non-money wallets. This find was consistent in 38 out of 40 countries with exceptions that were Mexico and Peru, where money was not important in low reporting cases.

Researchers considered various possible explanations of this outcome, including fear of being punished for making money, waiting for reporting, and the possibility that even when the wallet found was reported, it would return free of charge. When the wallets were collected, 98% of the money in them had returned. Other evidence showed that neither fear of punishment nor hope of reward was the primary motivation for reporting the wallet's finding.

Why, then, would people report a wallet with more money than a wallet that didn't have them? Researchers proposed four factors that determine whether someone with the opportunity to return the wallet would do so: the economic ransom for maintaining it, the attempt at reporting it, the unselfish concern for the owner, and the abort from seeing themselves as thieves. According to this model, although the presence of money raised the economic ransom for keeping the wallet [and the more money, the greater the ransom], economic gain was overcome by the combination of unselfish concern and the desire to see oneself as an honest person.

Evidence that altruistic concern played a part in the decision to report the wallet to the owner came from comparing the rules of the wallets ' return to or without the key placed in them. The key was promised to be important to the owner, but in contrast with the money, it does not matter to the person holding the wallet. Therefore, it is unlikely that there will be a survey of the self - image of an honest person, not a thief. Thus, key and cash wallets were more likely to be reported to owners than to cash without a key, suggesting that it was not only concern for the image as an honest person who caused the filter to report.

We all have to rejoice over these findings. It's common to hear people complain that we live in a time when self-interest dominates, where moral standards have collapsed, and where few people are attracted to others, and most people would steal if they thought they were not discovered. A new study in 40 countries, however, provides evidence that the world is not nearly that bad.