Honesty is majority policy in lost wallet experiment

Public more likely to return wallet containing larger sum of money, global study finds

Here's a moral dilemma: if you find a wallet stuffed with bank notes, do you pocket the cash or track down the owner to return it? We can each speak for ourselves, but now a team of economists have put the unsuspecting public to the test in a mass social experiment involving 17,000 "lost" wallets in 40 countries.

They found that a majority of people returned the wallets and - contrary to classic economic logic - they were more likely to do so the more money the wallet contained.