Members of a research team traveled to 355 cities in 40 countries carrying more than 17,000 wallets. In nearly every one of those countries, people were more likely to return a wallet stuffed with money than one that was empty. That finding alone overturned decades of economic theory. The more striking result, though, was what happened when the researchers doubled the amount of cash inside.
When wallets in the US, UK, and Poland contained the equivalent of about $94, return rates jumped to 72%, compared with 61% for those containing $13. Conventional logic says a higher financial incentive should make people less honest. The data went the other way.
The experiment, published in the journal Science and led by Alain Cohn of the University of Michigan and Michel André Maréchal of the University of Zurich, has become one of the most cited field studies on human honesty ever conducted. Its country-level rankings get shared widely. Its deeper findings get shared far less.
What the experiment actually did
Staff members at institutions such as museums, banks, and police stations unknowingly became part of a global field experiment in civic honesty when they were presented with wallets that supposedly had been found. Research assistants posed as people who had found wallets, hurriedly dropping them off at those institutions. Each wallet was a transparent business card case containing a grocery list, a key, and business cards printed in the local language, designed to make the supposed owner appear to be a local resident.
The team turned in over 17,000 lost wallets with varying amounts of money at public and private institutions across 40 countries, then waited to see whether the wallet recipients contacted the supposed owner by email. The presence of money, the equivalent of about $13 in local currency, boosted the response rate to about 51%, versus 40% for wallets with no cash.
The design was clever. By routing wallets through institutional workers rather than random passersby, the researchers created a controlled, repeatable drop-off procedure across wildly different cultures. But that design feature also shaped what the study could and couldn’t tell us.
The study measured how employees act when presented with a wallet at their workplaces. Whether those same people would act differently if they found a wallet on a sidewalk, the researchers couldn’t say. A person in a hotel lobby, aware that colleagues might notice whether they reported a lost item, faces a different social calculation than someone alone on a street corner. The setting matters.
The rankings and what they showed
In Switzerland, the wallet return rate was 74% for wallets without money and 79% with it, while in China the rates were 7% and 22%. Switzerland, Norway, and the Netherlands sat at the top of the rankings. At the other end, Peru, Morocco, and China recorded the lowest return rates, with China returning as few as 7% of empty wallets and Peru returning just 13% of wallets containing money.
The US figures were 39% without money and 57% with it, placing the country roughly in the middle of the global list alongside the UK. Those aggregate numbers can feel definitive. They’re not quite that simple.
Regardless of country, people were more likely to try to return wallets with larger amounts of money inside, a finding that directly contradicts long-standing economic models predicting that people are more likely to be dishonest when the potential payout is larger. A poll of 279 top-performing academic economists predicted the opposite result before the data came in. The fact that professional economists got it wrong is worth sitting with. Our intuitions about when and why people cheat are frequently miscalibrated.
Wealth appeared to be one of the strongest predictors of return rates. The trend toward returning money-containing wallets showed up in virtually every nation, although the actual numbers varied. Countries at the top of the honesty ranking were, almost without exception, among the world’s wealthiest. Countries at the bottom were among the poorest. That correlation doesn’t prove that residents of poorer countries are less honest by nature. Someone weighing $13 against a week’s wages is in a fundamentally different position than someone for whom that amount is trivial.
Why people return wallets at all
The study identified two main explanations for honest behavior. People’s honesty was not necessarily dependent on the possibility of economic gain. It had more to do with how bad the act of dishonesty made them feel.
Alain Cohn noted that “the evidence suggests that people tend to care about the welfare of others, and they have an aversion to seeing themselves as a thief.” Keeping a found wallet with someone’s name and photo on the business cards means reframing your own identity. Returning it is easier, psychologically, than living with the label. That internal pressure, the desire to maintain a positive self-image, increased as the financial stakes rose, because pocketing a larger sum felt like a more serious theft.
Wallets sometimes also contained a key, valuable only to the owner. Those wallets were returned more often than identical cases without one. The key represented no monetary value to the finder but signaled genuine inconvenience to the person who lost it. That altruistic response, returning something because the owner needs it rather than because there’s a reward in doing so, ran consistently across many of the countries tested.
The social setting of the experiment added another layer. Workers at a bank or museum who held onto a wallet were not just making a private moral decision. They were doing so in a place where colleagues knew what came through the door, where reputation operated as a real-world constraint. Shaul Shalvi, a professor of Behavioral Ethics at the University of Amsterdam, wrote a companion perspective to the Science study noting that it “provides a measure of civic honesty with an actual behavior that you may encounter in the real world,” which makes it more ecologically valid than lab-based tests. But it also means it measured honesty under specific social conditions, not some universal, unmediated moral trait.
Why different studies produce different rankings
The wallet experiment is not the only attempt to map honesty across countries. Dr. David Hugh-Jones, an economist at the University of East Anglia, tested participants in 15 countries using two different methods: a coin flip with a cash reward for reporting “heads,” and an online quiz where cheating was easy to do undetected.
Hugh-Jones found evidence for dishonesty in all countries, but levels varied significantly across them. In the coin flip, estimated dishonesty ranged from 3.4% in the UK to 70% in China. In the quiz, respondents in Japan were the most honest, followed by the UK, while those in Turkey were the least truthful.
In the coin flip test, the four least honest countries were China, Japan, South Korea, and India. However, Asian countries were not significantly more dishonest than others in the quiz, where Japan had the lowest level of dishonesty. The same country, tested two different ways, produced two completely different rankings. Hugh-Jones suggested the difference in Asian countries’ coin flip results may be explained by cultural views specific to that type of test, such as attitudes toward gambling, rather than differences in honesty as such.
Only small differences, well within the margin of error, separated countries near each other on the list, and the two tests yielded quite different rankings for the same countries. Honesty is not a single trait that can be measured with one ruler. Whether you’re measuring willingness to return a stranger’s property, tendency to lie under the cover of a coin flip, or resistance to cheating on a test for personal gain, you’re measuring three meaningfully different behaviors shaped by three different sets of social cues.
The wallet study picked up one specific slice of civic behavior: whether an institutional worker would contact a stranger about a lost item over a 100-day window. That’s genuinely useful data. It becomes misleading the moment it’s flattened into a national character judgment.
Corruption, norms, and honesty as a learned behavior
One of the most compelling threads in cross-cultural honesty research involves the relationship between institutional corruption and individual behavior. A 2016 study published in Nature by Simon Gächter of the University of Nottingham and Jonathan Schulz tested people from 23 countries and found a robust link between the prevalence of rule violations at the societal level and the dishonesty of individuals within those societies. Using a behavioral test in which lying was undetectable at the individual level but could be inferred at the population level, Gächter and Schulz found that high national scores on an index of rule-breaking were linked with reduced personal honesty.
Modern societies have created institutions to control cheating, but many situations remain where only intrinsic honesty keeps people from violating rules. Psychological, sociological, and economic theories suggest that the prevalence of rule violations in people’s social environment, including corruption, tax evasion, and political fraud, can compromise individual intrinsic honesty over time.
If people grow up in environments where institutions are unreliable, where rules are routinely bent by those in power, where trusting a stranger carries real risk, their behavior adjusts accordingly. Keeping a found wallet in a setting where civic institutions offer you little protection is a rational response to an environment, not evidence of a fixed moral deficiency.
Hugh-Jones found that the difference between Asian and other countries in the coin flip may be explained by cultural views specific to that type of test. People expected Greece to be the least honest country, but in the coin flip it was one of the most honest. Stereotypes about national character and actual measured behavior regularly diverge. The countries people expect to be dishonest are often not the ones that turn out that way.
The honest person’s dilemma
Nina Mazar of Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, together with colleagues, developed a theory of self-concept maintenance tested across six experiments, finding that people overwhelmingly see themselves as good people and seek to maintain that image, even when it conflicts with the impulse to get ahead financially. People, the research showed, will behave dishonestly enough to profit but not so dishonestly that they can no longer think of themselves as honest individuals. That internal ceiling on cheating is surprisingly robust across cultures.
This is the mechanism that the wallet experiment tapped into. Returning a wallet with someone’s name on it, when you’re standing at a reception desk in full view of colleagues, costs you almost nothing. Keeping it reshapes how you see yourself. The math, psychologically, tilts toward honesty. Strip away the social visibility, reduce the human element, and the calculation shifts.
What science can and can’t tell us about honesty
Rankings like the one produced by the wallet experiment capture something real: measurable behavioral differences across national populations in a specific, controlled scenario. They don’t capture why those differences exist, and they certainly don’t describe the character of every person within any given country. The same individual who would pocket a found wallet on a Tuesday might return one on a Thursday if their social context, mood, financial pressure, or sense of being watched had shifted.
Honest behavior responds to incentives. People are more likely to act honestly when the cost to someone else is visible and personal, when the financial stakes of dishonesty feel high enough to threaten their self-image, and when social accountability exists. Building environments in workplaces, families, and communities where honesty is the visible norm, where cutting corners carries real social cost, and where trust is actively demonstrated rather than assumed makes it easier for people to act honestly.
The takeaway
Societies with high civic trust don’t produce honest citizens because of some innate national temperament. Gächter and Schulz’s research makes clear that honesty is partly a product of the environment people grow up in. When institutions are trustworthy and rule-following is the visible norm, individuals internalize those standards. When they aren’t, individuals adapt to that reality instead.
The wallet experiment gives us a snapshot of civic honesty in a particular setting, under particular conditions, at a particular moment. That snapshot is valuable. Calling it proof that one country is more dishonest than another by nature is a step the data cannot support. What the research does support is something more actionable: honesty is a behavior that conditions, norms, and environments can either encourage or erode. That makes it something every community, organization, and individual can meaningfully influence.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.
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