Losing your wallet is an absolute nightmare.
Not only do you get the anguish of losing a bunch of cash, photos and important cards that you’ll likely never get back, but there’s the annoying step of cancelling all your bank cards and replacing everything.
Now if you’re some spud who is prone to misplacing your wallet, worry no longer because we have good news!
Some folks decided to do a study into this whole losing wallet thing and found that the best method of getting a lost wallet returned is by *checks notes* making sure it’s stuffed with cash.
Researchers published a study in Science, titled ‘Civic Honesty Around the Globe’, that looked into what people do when they find a lost wallet. Do they return it? Leave it where they found it because they can’t bear the responsibility? Or return it but take all the money out of it first?
Well after experiments involving losing over 17,000 wallets in 355 cities across 40 countries, the results showed that wallets with more money in them are more likely to be returned than those that had no dosh. Bet you didn’t expect that.
While the return rates varied between country to country – China hovered between eight to 22 percent while Australia was between 55 to 70 percent – the results were pretty consistent in showing that wallets filled with moolah have a better chance of being returned than empty ones.
So why is this the case? To figure that out whether people return wallets from the goodness of their hearts or something else, the researchers did another test by putting keys – useless to the finder but valuable to the wallet owner -in some wallets.
Interestingly, the results showed that wallets with both money and keys were more likely to be returned than ones that had money but no key. Just to make sure, 2,525 people were surveyed about this topic and the general consensus was that feelings of stealing went up when there was more money involved but they didn’t give a crap about the key.
So in short, people are more likely to return wallets filled with money not because they care about its owner but because they’re more concerned about painting themselves as a good person rather than a thief.
Okay, so this study shows that people are inherently selfish and don’t really care about their fellow humans. Suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised with that.
But on the bright side, at least it means you have around a 70 percent chance of getting your lost wallet back if it’s stuffed with cash so that’s something good that came out of the study at least.