11 Wallets Deliberatly Lost to Test Honesty

[ArmorOfGod]

http://www.wallettest.com/

...Each of the 100 wallets contained $2.10 in real money, a fake $50.00 gift certificate, some miscellaneous items and a clearly written ID card identifying the lost wallet's rightful owner. We were curious as to how honest people would be and wanted to see how different races, genders and age groups would compare to each other

Interesting, but I don't think the results proved anything on gener or race. Still, I remember working at a large large store many years ago and the loss prevention guy told me that he caught more middle age white women stealing than any other demographic.

AoG

 

[ArmorOfGod]

That title should have read "100 Wallets."
Oops.

AoG

 

[MA-Caver]

Ya I was going to make a thread about that but never got around to it.
It is interesting to see... the results and to know if people are still honest or deceitful.
Quite interesting to be sure.

 

[exile]

http://www.wallettest.com/



Interesting, but I don't think the results proved anything on gener or race. Still, I remember working at a large large store many years ago and the loss prevention guy told me that he caught more middle age white women stealing than any other demographic.

AoG

It's such a tiny sample... if they replicated the same results in 1000 different trials, it might show something. But a single sample can be the wildest outlier off the curve possible and if you don't follow it up, how would you know?

In a way, I'm not surprised at the overall result. I've lived long enough to know better, but I still have this sense that people are mostly honest. But robust results about gender, age and `race'? Not from this experiment...

 

[Ping898]

Reader's Digest does this on occassion....or something similar. What I find interesting is more times then not (based upon appearance/quality of clothes of the person who finds the wallet and talking with the individuals who return the wallets) it is those who need the money the most that return the wallet with all the money in tact....