A Social Experiment on Honesty

This video explores a global social experiment known as the Lost Wallet Test, which examined honesty among front desk workers in various countries. It delves into the motivations behind honest behavior and the surprising results of the study, highlighting the importance of honesty in society.

Picture this: you're working a slow shift in a hotel lobby when someone hurriedly approaches the front desk. They've 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. 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. Providing 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. 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.